"My Guy, I Can Code": After Deconstructing Adobe, Dev Uses Claude To Clone Microsoft Office For Free

Days after unveiling free, open-source stand-ins for seven Adobe applications, Atlanta engineer Brandon Thomas has turned to Microsoft Office. This week he posted WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft - replicas of Word, Excel and PowerPoint - to GitHub, Tom's Hardware reported. Thomas says he used Anthropic's Claude to help build the software and is giving the results away.The Adobe set came first. Gizmodo's Mike Pearl reported on Oct. 7 that Thomas had used Claude Opus 5.5 and the Rust programming language to recreate Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere and four other Adobe applications. Thomas wrote on Hacker News that they were in early alpha and "not anywhere close to ready," while Pearl called the Photoshop stand-in "glitchy, but real." Adobe, Pearl noted, agreed to a $150 million settlement after federal prosecutors sued it in 2024, alleging it was "trapping" people in subscription plans.The Office clones followed within days. Paul Thurrott reported on Oct. 9 that WordCraft reads and writes DOCX files, and that ArtCraft, Thomas's company, calls it 87 percent complete for ribbon commands and about 62 percent complete for real feature parity. For GridCraft, a pre-alpha Excel stand-in, ArtCraft claims 93 percent of Excel's worksheet functions. DeckCraft, the PowerPoint stand-in, is said to cover about 79 percent of the feature set and to be 80 percent of the way to a first alpha.Thurrott also reported that ArtCraft has removed the download links from its website, leaving GitHub as the way to get the code.Gadget Pilipinas took a closer look at the project's documentation and found some important caveats. WordCraft's roadmap says charts, SmartArt and embedded OLE objects are lost when a DOCX file is loaded and saved, and validation against real business documents had not yet begun. The site also noted that counting ribbon commands measures whether a feature can be invoked, not whether it actually behaves the way Word does. It listed the licenses as Apache-2.0 or MIT. Release numbers differ between the two outlets: Thurrott reported version 0.3.0, while Gadget Pilipinas cited 0.5.0.The larger target is the subscription model itself. When Microsoft added Copilot to its consumer plans in January 2025, PCWorld reported, Microsoft 365 Personal rose from about $7 a month to $10 and Family from about $10 to $13, with 60 AI credits a month included. Existing subscribers could remain at the old price on a "Classic" plan.And the customer base is enormous. Microsoft last reported 89 million consumer Microsoft 365 subscribers in July 2025 and then stopped publishing the metric, according to Office-Watch, which estimates the total is now about 95 million. It also reported that consumer cloud revenue rose 24 percent in the quarter ended June 30.Tom's Hardware called Thomas's project "a targeted protest" against subscription software and said ArtCraft's Discord community is already asking for more, with a CAD clone among the most frequent requests. But it also cautioned that most of the apps are "still far from what they intend to replace."After the Adobe release, critics dismissed the software as vibecoded "AI slop." Thomas answered on X:My guy, I can code In college I was building laser games on skyscrapers and cloning the luciferase-luciferin system into plants via agrobacterium-mediated transfection AI models enable me to work as an entire company. I'm doing 4x better than Google's revenue per employee https://t.co/HE3qk7paBm pic.twitter.com/sGCkdy92QM — e/chelon (@echelon) October 9, 2026The revenue-per-employee comparison is Thomas's own claim, and none of the coverage cited here independently checked it.The project's "clean-room" description also remains untested. ArtCraft says the apps are clean-room reimplementations written from public specifications and observed behavior. Besthub summarized the view of lawyer Neil Brown, who it said notes that the legal position depends on the jurisdiction and argues that an independent reimplementation made without access to the original source code may not infringe. None of the coverage cited here reports a legal challenge from Microsoft or Adobe.None of this means Office has been replaced. By ArtCraft's own figure, WordCraft remains about 38 percent short of real feature parity, and the documentation makes clear that important functionality is still missing.What has changed is the cost and speed of producing a plausible competitor. One engineer working with a coding model has released rough but working versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint only days after doing the same for Adobe's creative suite - and he is aiming directly at a market where the incumbents have spent years moving customers toward recurring subscriptions.