Open-source Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, and Word replications

giancarlostoro

Yep, I realized this back in February, you can remake basically anything in a drastically shorter span of time with a single frontier model and patience and test thoroughly.

Stitch4223

I’d be thoroughly impressed if all the weird quirks of Excel also make the cut.

800xl

All I see in this article is bunch of ads and something about people arguing on Twitter. Is there a link to the actual project or announcement?

cosmicradiance

Internet decentralized the data. Now, AI has decentralized software. Next, we need decentralized AI.

muglug

Can these tools withstand Microsoft’s lawyers?

sega_sai

I'd rather wish people put effort into LibreOffice. I'd hoped there would be significant improvements there as there is a huge scope of bug/compatibility fixes. But I guess it is not sexy enough.

variety8675

The media response to this omits the fact that these vibe coded "reverse engineered" apps hardly work and we've had open source alternatives to the Microsoft and Adobe products for years. The narrative they're pushing is a frontier model can make a perfect clone of any app, and the reality is it makes a ui that looks somewhat similar but none of the functionality actually works.

nestorD

My thinking is that cloning existing apps is missing the point. It still takes a disproportionate amount of time to get all of the functionalities and quirks of the original right. But, it takes no time to get the handful of things you need working, on your system. That is where I see the most potential: there is little need for massive pieces of software that do everything, I can build the components I need, customized for my use case, and move on.

dariosalvi78

I've been thinking about this these days, this is the final revenge of open source. After having ingurgitated all the open source projects there exist in the world, AI is making basically all software un-copyrighteable (yes, you can't copyright a picture made by AI as you can't copyright a piece of software made -entirely- by AI).

dh2022

Awesome. Now do one for TurboTax!

thomasfl

It should be doable to vibe code all Microsoft Office apps by using Apache OpenOffice as input. The Artcraft team seems to have successfully been able to vibe code all of Adobe's creative suite https://getartcraft.com

eviks

> Most of these apps are still far from what they intend to replace, however, so we'll have to see how deep this message cuts Has the author even opened the apps, let alone tried to use them? > GridCraft on getartcraft.com > WordCraft on getartcraft.com > 404 This page could not be found (though, "to be fair", not existing is "far from what they intend to replace")

andai

They'll call it AI, but they won't call it bad.

dgellow

We are really speed running destroying the software market, the long term effects won’t be nice. There is a reason FLOSS isn’t about cloning 1-1 existing applications. That’s something we could always have done if we really wanted. What we will end up with will be corporations pushing everything to the cloud, pushing for even stricter copyright/trademark protections to fight against that type of clones, stricter controls over software distribution. Instead of using the power of LLMs to create genuine new products we instead get clone factories just to avoid paying or switch to an alternative. What a really dumb future we are building here, where trying to create novel software is a risk because any 14yo with a Claude subscription will clone it, distribute it for free. At least with keygen someone had to be pretty skillful and the distribution was niche…

zzril

This would be interesting if it was based on markdown and Jupyter notebooks and all that good stuff we have today. But just replicating what was useful some 37 years ago to get office workers accustomed to the new digital world? Why?

Helmut10001

There's no need for GUI based apps linke these anymore: RevealJS, Typst, Grist. They are CI&CD native and give you infinite reproducibility.

mvdwoord

On mobile so cannot test but does this include power query?

bastard_op

I've been waiting 26 years for a Visio replacement since M$ bought it, hopefully they can do it too. No other app or web-based copies are good enough still (sorta omnigraffle if you use a mac [ew, no]), and I've tried most over the years to find one as I still use Visio weekly in 2026. It's the only reason I'll actually buy a copy of real windoze and visio for keeping around a VM, I can still buy real licenses overseas for both visio and project for ~$20usd each instead of the ~$500-1000usd actually IN the US.

sombragris

I don't buy the hype on these vibecoded apps, but I think an interesting use of this methodology would be to revive proprietary applications that were axed by their owners. For example, what about a new clone of Macromedia's Free Hand? or Adobe's Page Maker? Or MS Front Page, vibecoded to be compliant with the latest W3C standards?

anthk

This is AI generated and it's impressive too, https://www.os8088.com/ but if you have an old PC with Frotz to play with, create some game by hand (no AI used, at all) with Inform6 or better, Puny Inform and try doing things by yourself. You will be surprised of what you can do with very little...