ArtCraft Developer Releases Open-Source WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft Built With Claude
Brandon Thomas of ArtCraft released WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft, open-source Office-style apps built with Claude, and they have thousands of stars.
Brandon Thomas, the developer behind ArtCraft, has announced WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft: open-source stand-ins for Word, Excel and PowerPoint, made with Claude, according to Tom's Hardware. LavX News describes the apps as pre-alpha; Pillitteri reports that their v0.5.0 releases declare alpha status.
The pace is the story. Pasquale Pillitteri reports the repositories were created October 6, v0.1.0 installers for Windows, macOS, Linux and FreeBSD landed October 7 to 8, and v0.5.0 arrived October 10 to 11, with a RISC-V Linux build. As of October 11, WordCraft has 3,564 GitHub stars, GridCraft 2,028 and DeckCraft 1,535.
Pillitteri reports the apps are written in Rust. As of October 11, commits carrying a Claude Opus 5.5 co-author line number 159 of 187 in WordCraft, 64 of 248 in GridCraft and 45 of 61 in DeckCraft. Every action is a command reachable from the command line, a JSON channel or an MCP server.
Context: Microsoft acknowledged an inquiry and offered no further response, per LavX News. Neil Brown of decoded.legal said the situation is "quite possibly litigated" when the aggrieved party has "deep pockets and lots of lawyers." Per Pillitteri, download links for the three apps are gone from getartcraft.com, with no statement from Thomas on why. Releases remain on GitHub.
My take: grab it from GitHub, not the website, and keep your macros out of it. Pillitteri reports that GridCraft discards VBA macros when it opens an .xlsm file. My macros are not volunteering for that experiment.
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Sources
- Creator of free Adobe clones unveils open-source Microsoft Office Excel, PowerPoint, and Word replications — Autodesk tools and other subscription-based services may come next, Tom's Hardware
- ArtCraft launches WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft, free Office clones in Rust, Pasquale Pillitteri
- ArtCraft targets Word, Excel and PowerPoint with Rust reimplementations built with Claude, news.lavx.hu
Meanwhile at the anchor desk
Three apps, one week, more than 7,000 GitHub stars combined, and Microsoft has said nothing but hello. That is what a market looks like when it is quietly raising its hand!
The 1.4 millisecond layout figure is the developers' own claim, and the sources give no benchmark method. Also note GridCraft's Claude co-author line sits on 64 of 248 commits, so "built with Claude" varies by app.
