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Developer Who Cloned Photoshop With AI Just Did the Same to Microsoft Office
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- DeepHorus
Brandon Thomas, the developer who previously used AI to rebuild Adobe's Creative Cloud for free, has now released open-source clones of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The three applications, named WordCraft, GridCraft, and DeckCraft, were published on GitHub and built with Anthropic's Claude. They are written in Rust and licensed under MIT and Apache 2.0, allowing anyone to read, modify, and even reuse the code commercially. The release directly targets Microsoft 365, which costs $99.99 per year for a single user.
Thomas, the engineer behind the ArtCraft project, turned to Microsoft after making waves earlier this month with free clones of Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, and Lightroom. ArtCraft was built with Claude Opus 5.5 after Adobe charged him a cancellation fee one too many times. His new project arrives amid a broader wave of AI cloning, including a developer running GTA V natively on an iPhone and modders placing Minecraft creepers into Elden Ring. The Office clones follow the same clean-room approach, written from public file-format specifications rather than copied Microsoft code.
WordCraft reads and writes .docx files and covers 88% of Word's ribbon features, including track changes, footnotes, citations, and mail merge. Yet the team estimates it is only about 60% ready to replace Word for real work and still labels it alpha. A test of WordCraft found it weighs only 91MB, feels snappy, and looks almost identical to Microsoft Word. For everyday office jobs, it can already replace the premium suite.
GridCraft handles 513 of Excel's 523 worksheet functions and 89% of ribbon commands, but its developers rate it just 50% ready. Compatibility with real-world .xlsx files is next on the to-do list. DeckCraft covers roughly 79% of PowerPoint's features and 93% of core ones, opens and saves .pptx files, runs transitions and animations, and exports to PDF, though it has not reached alpha.
A single Rust codebase runs natively on Windows, macOS, Linux, and BSD, and also inside a web browser. This design blocks memory bugs and delivers speed. Every button in all three apps doubles as a command that an AI agent can trigger through MCP, the Model Context Protocol created by Anthropic. In practice, a user could ask Claude to build a chart or reformat a report without touching a mouse.
The implications for Microsoft are significant. Microsoft 365 Personal costs $99.99 annually, and the family plan is $129.99, which is how most households access Word and Excel. Thomas's clones offer similar everyday functionality for free and run fully offline. While the team admits the apps are not yet production-ready, their rapid progress suggests AI-assisted development could soon challenge established productivity suites. Future work includes improving .xlsx compatibility for GridCraft and pushing DeckCraft to its first alpha.
