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WordCraft, a free look-alike of Microsoft Word: the familiar ribbon with Home, Insert, Design, Layout, References, Mailings, Review and View tabs, a Styles gallery, a Navigation pane and a document titled The Open Studio Handbook.

AI at work · Tools

One developer, one AI model, a free copy of Word, Excel and PowerPoint

· About 3 min read

Brandon Thomas, a software engineer from Atlanta, rebuilt Adobe's creative apps with an AI model last week and gave them away. This week he did the same to Microsoft Office: free, open-source look-alikes of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, called WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft (Geektime). If you pay for Office at home or at work, the question is no longer only "is it free?" but "what exactly am I paying for, if one person with an AI can rebuild it in weeks?"

Ofir Wienerman · All posts · Screenshot: WordCraft, from the ArtCraft project (Apache 2.0)

In this article
  1. Who and what
  2. What works today
  3. At work?
  4. The open question

Who he is and what he released

Thomas spent eight years as an engineer at the payments company Square. Fed up with Adobe's subscriptions and cancellation fees, he used Anthropic's model Claude Opus 5.5 to write free versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere and four more Adobe apps, and released them on 8 October (Geektime). His followers then asked for Office next. Geektime quotes his manifesto (our translation): "AI gives us the technology back. Now you can build apps that are 1:1. Nothing can stop you."

The project is called ArtCraft and now lists thirteen apps, including look-alikes of Figma and AutoCAD. They are free, open source, and run on Windows, Mac, Linux and in a browser. The money is meant to come from the AI features inside them, paid per use (Geektime).

What the Word, Excel and PowerPoint clones can do today

At first glance, a lot. WordCraft has the ribbon, styles, track changes, mail merge and tables of contents, and opens and saves Word's .docx files. By the project's own count it covers 88% of the buttons on Word's ribbon (WordCraft on GitHub). GridCraft opens Excel files with formulas, pivot tables and charts; DeckCraft opens and saves PowerPoint files.

GridCraft, the Excel look-alike, showing a quarterly sales dashboard: a table with filter buttons, data bars and sparklines next to a column chart and a pie chart, under a ribbon with Home, Insert, Formulas and Data tabs.
GridCraft, the Excel look-alike. Screenshot: ArtCraft project.
DeckCraft, the PowerPoint look-alike, editing a slide titled From the Sun to your sky, with four coloured shapes joined by arrows and a slide list on the left.
DeckCraft, the PowerPoint look-alike. Screenshot: ArtCraft project.

One more detail matters for anyone using AI at work: every command can also be run by an AI assistant, so Claude can write or edit a document in WordCraft directly (WordCraft on GitHub).

Can you use it at work?

Not yet, and the project says so itself. All three apps are labelled alpha, meaning early and unstable. Its own estimate puts WordCraft about 60% of the way to replacing Word for real work, and DeckCraft about 55% of the way to replacing PowerPoint (WordCraft, DeckCraft). Charts and SmartArt do not yet survive a round trip through a Word file, and printing is not finished.

  • German users, note: the menus come in German, but the spell checker only knows English and Polish (WordCraft).
  • On a company laptop, new software is your IT department's call, not yours. Ask before you install.
  • The good part: everything runs on your own computer, with no cloud in between.

The question nobody has answered yet

Is it legal to copy the look and feel of Word with an AI? The project calls its apps a "clean-room" rebuild: written from public file specifications and from watching how the originals behave, not from Microsoft's code, and it states that it is not affiliated with Microsoft (WordCraft). Whether that holds up is for Microsoft's and Adobe's lawyers to test. Geektime points out the irony: for now, the whole project is hosted on GitHub, which Microsoft owns.

The bigger question is for the rest of us. If one person and an AI model can rebuild a suite like Office in weeks, the price of software may soon depend less on the code and more on what surrounds it: support, security, and the files your colleagues already send you. Our advice for now: try WordCraft at home, on a copy of a real document, and see how far it gets.

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