Developer Who Cloned Photoshop With AI Just Did the Same to Microsoft Office

What it claims

Brandon Thomas, author of the ArtCraft Adobe clones, has released three Rust apps on GitHub under MIT and Apache 2.0 licences, built with help from Anthropic's Claude:

• WordCraft (Word): reads and writes .docx and covers 88% of Word's ribbon features. Track changes, footnotes, citations and mail merge are implemented.
• GridCraft (Excel): supports 513 of Excel's 523 worksheet functions and 89% of ribbon commands.
• DeckCraft (PowerPoint): covers about 79% of PowerPoint's features and 93% of the core ones, per its GitHub page. It opens and saves .pptx, runs transitions and animations, and exports to PDF.

They shipped less than two weeks after the Adobe clones. WordCraft had over 12,000 GitHub stars at the time of writing.

How it works

• Clean-room build. The apps were written from public file-format specifications and from watching how the Microsoft originals behave, without copying Microsoft code.
• One codebase. It runs natively on Windows, macOS, Linux and BSD, and in a browser.
• Agent control. Every button in all three apps is also a command exposed over MCP (Model Context Protocol). An agent can drive the apps directly, for example "build a chart" or "reformat a report".

Evidence

• Coverage figures (88% and 89% of ribbon features, 513 of 523 functions, 79% and 93% of PowerPoint features) are self-reported by the project. The page gives no test suite or file corpus behind them.
• Decrypt's hands-on test found WordCraft to be a 91 MB download that "feels snappy" and looks close to Word. This is impressionistic, not a benchmark.

Maturity

Limits

• Real-file compatibility is unproven. GridCraft knows the formulas but may fail on real-world .xlsx files; compatibility with those is the next item on its to-do list.
• WordCraft's roadmap before beta includes:
• testing against real-world .docx files
• charts and SmartArt that survive a save
• page layout closer to Word's
• a stability sweep
• native printing

Treat round-tripping of complex documents, and anything you need to print, as unreliable for now.

• Roadmaps may slip. The article notes Thomas has a habit of over-promising; he already walked back a pledge to match Adobe's feature set within a month.
• Model attribution is looser than the catalog summary suggests. The page names Claude Opus 5.5 as the model behind ArtCraft and says only "Claude" for the Office clones. The model details it gives refer to ArtCraft's model:
• pricing of $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens
• 66.4% on Terminal-Bench 4.0
• No adoption details. The article does not link the repository directly or give install or build instructions. You would need to find the GitHub repos yourself.