The developer who cloned Photoshop using AI has now created Word, Excel and PowerPoint replicas with Claude

First look: Although users and developers often refer to mood-coded applications as “AI slop,” generative AI can now produce complex productivity applications that rival market leaders. After creating free, open-source alternatives to Adobe’s Creative Cloud apps using Claude AI, developer Brandon Thomas is now turning his attention to replicas of Microsoft Office apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Called WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft respectively, the open source applications are written in Rust using Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5, as were Adobe Replicas, and are available for download under MIT or Apache 2.0 licenses. They are, however, still in a relatively early stage of development and require much more work before they can be considered viable alternatives to Microsoft Office.

According to its GitHub page, WordCraft is an “open source, cleanroom reimplementation of Microsoft Word” that runs natively on Windows, macOS, Linux, and BSD. It can also be used in the browser via WebAssembly. The application uses a single Rust codebase for all platforms, without relying on Electron or Tauri.

WordCraft reads and writes .docx, Microsoft Word’s native file format. It also supports a range of other formats, including .odt, .rtf, .html, .md and .txt, and can import the older .doc format. It can also export PDFs with real, selectable text, links and bookmarks. Thomas noted that spelling, grammar and many other essential features work offline.

WordCraft is visually almost identical to the software it is modeled after, offering the same ribbons, styles, tables, track changes, and references as Word. It also implements features such as mail merge, which allows users to create personalized letters by extracting data from a CSV file or an Outlook contact list.

GridCraft, which replicates Microsoft Excel, already implements 89 percent of Excel’s ribbon and menu commands, according to the developer, and about 98 percent of its spreadsheet functions. It offers the familiar Excel interface, including the ribbon, formula bar, keyboard shortcuts, and more. It uses .xlsx as its native file format and is fully scriptable by AI agents.

DeckCraft, which opens and saves .pptx files, aims for full feature parity with PowerPoint and is “better and faster” than the original. Its GitHub page claims 79% “feature parity” across 191 PowerPoint features, including advanced formatting and PDF export.

WordCraft development is the most advanced, with 88% of Word’s ribbon-based commands implemented.

Overall, the project estimates it has achieved around 60% feature parity with the Microsoft app. All three apps are in alpha, with GridCraft at about 50% “ready for real work” and DeckCraft at about 55%.