Brandon Thomas, the developer behind ArtCraft — a set of free, open-source replacements for Adobe's creative apps — released WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft on October 13, targeting Word, Excel and PowerPoint respectively. The three apps are written in Rust with help from Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5, are offered under MIT or Apache 2.0 licenses, run natively on Windows, macOS, Linux and BSD, and also work in browsers via WebAssembly from a single Rust codebase without Electron or Tauri. Per the GitHub pages, WordCraft reads and writes .docx along with .odt, .rtf, .html, .md and .txt, and supports styles, tables, track changes, spell/grammar check and mail merge; the developer says GridCraft already implements about 89% of Excel's ribbon and menu commands and roughly 98% of its worksheet functions; DeckCraft opens and saves .pptx and exports to PDF or images. Coverage and Reddit discussion note the apps remain early-stage: some call them "AI slop" and question whether one developer can keep up with fixes and upgrades, while Thomas says he has 15 years of coding experience and argues there is "no reason to save broken software" such as LibreOffice or GIMP.

Brandon Thomas·ArtCraft·WordCraft·+5