Many users and developers criticize vibe-coded apps as “AI slop.” Still, generative AI can now build complex productivity apps that compete with established products. Brandon Thomas, who used Claude to create free, open-source alternatives to Adobe’s Creative Cloud apps, is now working on replicas of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
The three open-source apps are named WordCraft, GridCraft, and DeckCraft. As with the Adobe replicas, they were written in Rust using Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5. They can be downloaded under MIT or Apache 2.0 licenses. However, they are still at an early stage and need much more work before they can serve as real alternatives to Microsoft Office.
According to its GitHub page, WordCraft is a “clean-room reimplementation of Microsoft Word” that’s open source. It runs natively on Windows, macOS, Linux, and BSD, and it can also be used in a browser through WebAssembly. It’s all one Rust codebase, too, so there’s no Electron or Tauri hiding underneath.
WordCraft can read and write .docx, Microsoft Word’s native format. It also handles .odt, .rtf, .html, .md, and .txt files, and it can import the older .doc format. PDF exports keep real, selectable text along with links and bookmarks. Thomas said spelling, grammar, and many other key features work offline.
Visually, WordCraft is nearly identical to Microsoft Word. It offers the same ribbon, styles, tables, track changes, and references. It also includes mail merge, which creates personalized letters from data in a CSV file or an Outlook contacts list.
WordCraft is the most developed of the three apps. According to the project, it has implemented 88% of Word’s ribbon-based commands.
GridCraft is the project’s take on Microsoft Excel. The developer says it’s already got 89% of Excel’s ribbon and menu commands and around 98% of its worksheet functions. It looks and feels like Excel too, with the ribbon, formula bar, keyboard shortcuts, and so on. It saves as .xlsx, and AI agents can script the whole thing.
DeckCraft works with .pptx files, and its goal is to do everything PowerPoint does, only “better and faster.” The GitHub page says it’s at 79% parity across 191 PowerPoint features, and that includes advanced formatting and PDF export.
Overall, the project puts itself at roughly 60% feature parity with the Microsoft app. All three applications are still in alpha. GridCraft is about 50% “ready for real work,” and DeckCraft is at around 55%.
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