this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2026
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Brandon Thomas, developer of ArtCraft, a suite of open-source creative tools meant to replicate Adobe applications for free, has now announced apps to replace Microsoft Office tools such as Excel, PowerPoint, and Word, respectively, named GridCraft, DeckCraft, and WordCraft, that are created with Claude. Thomas has shared his new clones to ArtCraft GitHub, making them free for all to download.

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[–] godsammitdam@lemmy.zip 22 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (3 children)

It's funny, but we've had LibreOffice for years. I'll take the human made one, thanks.

But continue making the unaccountable Epstein class uncomfortable. Autodesk next, yes please. I'll still use FreeCAD but boy is it quirky lol.

[–] Zerush@lemmy.ml 8 points 20 hours ago

LibreOffice is used since years in Spain in companies and administrations

[–] 3abas@lemmy.world 2 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

He already released cadcraft, I haven't tried it yet

[–] cobalt32@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 14 hours ago

CADCraft appears to only be 2D CAD.

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[–] FE80@lemmy.world 16 points 21 hours ago

Comedy gold.

[–] DonutsRMeh@lemmy.world 19 points 22 hours ago

This is quite literally one of the best things of this fucking century. Imagine what is going to happen to these mother fuckers and their bottom line. They have been a knife in Linux’ side for decades holding so many people from switching and now look at this. Your love or hate towards AI right now actually doesn’t matter, because the end result is way greater than it. I’m rejoicing hard over this

[–] pineapplelover@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Looking forward for the coming months to see if any of these programs can have all the bugs ironed out

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[–] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 28 points 1 day ago (11 children)

Lots of anti-AI sentiments in here and I get that, but I'd like to discuss the implications here, cause this is actually somewhat revolutionary.

If I can just take any software and reverse-engineer it or recreate it to a precision that is practically indistinguishable from the original (not saying it really is in this case, but for the sake of discussion) and I then have copyright over that copy, doesn't that turn things on it's head? Doesn't that make software essentially worthless? Any software you sell someone, they can recreate and distribute for free, legally (presumably). I suppose we've yet to see if this will really turn out to be legal, but it's hard to argue how this is illegal, I would say - how is this different than a human closely studying Microsoft Word and "simply" writing their own version of the same program?

I'm not sure if this is good or bad honestly, but it sure is interesting. Anyone else have thoughts around how this affects the worth of software?

[–] NakedNateRollerSkate@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

I'm an IP attorney. You don't have copyright over the thing you created with AI as you describe it. Copyright applies only to a minimally original expression by a human at this time.

[–] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 5 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

But that only strengthens the argument that software is worthless now - I can copy existing software with AI and it is public domain basically is what you're saying? So again, I can make a copy and legally distribute it. How can anyone earn money on software in that world?

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[–] Senal@programming.dev 11 points 23 hours ago (4 children)

In broad terms this is already covered.

If you made an exact clone of Photoshop by hand you'd get sued into oblivion, and that would be effective because of the barrier to entry ( in time and resources ) you'd need to get to that point.

Meaning you'd be betting all that upfront effort/resource on the a major corporation either not caring, or not being able to mount a reasonable litigation strategy.

Not many actors would be willing to risk that.

The difference here is that the barrier is now much lower and it tangles up a whole bunch of other potential issues around the legality of vibe code.

Regardless of how it shakes out it will almost certainly be a set of rules that only really apply to the peasants.

"If the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the lower class.”

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[–] xilophor@lemmy.world 5 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (1 children)

I do think some implications not many people think about is how companies will combat this. Of course there's copyright and patents, though I'm not sure how all that will pan out.

A more impactful implication, in my mind, is this will create a larger push to move applications and/or games to be online only and not distribute any version of the application; since, as far what I can imagine, that is the best and potentially only way to combat this. Just don't give people the compiled programs. Which sucks.

This largely stemmed from modding games together and expanding the capabilities of modding, but I think this may seriously harm modding by preventing it from even happening on new games, which does scare me as a modder.

Granted, we sorta had this already - many Godot and Unity games were relatively easy to decompile, and many popular games are still released using those engines. Though, most, if not all, triple A games have moved away from Unity, if there even were that many to begin with. And that may be because of the fact that Unity games are easy to decompile.

This is all guessing, but I do suspect you'll see the largest impacts of this in triple A games and large consumer-oriented software; commercial-only software may not see as much impact due to security, liability, and licensing implications of using (potentially unsupported) clones.

[–] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 2 points 15 hours ago

I think this may seriously harm modding by preventing it from even happening on new games, which does scare me as a modder.

I did think about games too and I was about to use it as an example, but as software, I think games are actually much harder to legally copy and distribute, because so much of a game is its art assets. Sure you can copy the software no problem, but you can't really copy the artistic expression of the game. You can't copy Hades and keep the great illustrations and animations. You couldn't keep the music or voice acting. All of that would be copyright infringement.

So games are actually somewhat legally protected still, I'd say, basically because they contain much more art and creativity than most other programs.

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[–] ksh@aussie.zone 11 points 21 hours ago

I refuse to discourage people from providing everyone free and open source alternatives. If you don’t like or want to try then don’t. If they are working at making it better then that’s great for us.

[–] jtrek@startrek.website 60 points 1 day ago

I'm pretty happy with libre office. Not keen on AI code

[–] DickFiasco@sh.itjust.works 76 points 1 day ago (3 children)
[–] Zephorah@discuss.online 68 points 1 day ago (5 children)

It is funny though. Microsoft being undermined by the very thing they’re using to undermine working class people.

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[–] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 27 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (5 children)

"cat looks inside" meme template: "[...]", "looks inside", "slop"

Should this be allowed here in !opensource@lemmy.ml?

It is obviously built using Claude, ~~but it is not (as I first thought) a project that started a month ago - the first commit in the current repo is from a month ago but it refers to their previous ("multi-hundred GB" lol) git repo. So this is actually built on something with history going back to before the vibe coding era.~~ (edit: actually i take it back, i see now photocraft started on september 30 and the commit message on the second commit is "one-shot" 🫠)

I see the project lead's two most recent posts on the site formerly known as twitter are disparaging LibreOffice and Gimp and Kdenlive.

Until yesterday this part was under a "fair source" (meaning not open source) license but now it has been relicensed MIT + Apache 🤔

Have you actually tried any of these 12 apps yet, OP? Are they any good, or are they just marketing for a service reselling genAI tokens?

[–] leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

looks inside

slop

To be fair you'd get more or less the same result if you looked inside any modern microsoft product, and they'd ask you to pay for the privilege on top...

(Of course replacing slop with different flavour slop, even if it's cheaper, doesn't accomplish much; better to use properly developed software like LibreOffice.)

[–] Substance_P@lemmy.world 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)

No I haven't tried any of these 12 apps, I am perfectly happy with Gimp, affinity photo and LibreOffice. I posted this because for one, the opensource community three days ago had a fervent conversation about photocraft, the same developer. Secondly, as written in the rules of the community it says "feel free to ask questions and share news, and interesting stuff."

I am not promoting anything AI, in fact I hate the direction it is going in and the threat it poses to real developers. That said, there is clearly a plenty of schadenfreude that comes from this, nobody can't deny its sweet to extend the middle finger to these megacorps.

Not sure where you get the idea that I posted this as a marketing ploy reselling genAI tokens?

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[–] SocialistVibes01@lemmy.ml 93 points 1 day ago (21 children)
[–] iturnedintoanewt@lemmy.world 47 points 1 day ago

Well, if thanks to this we finally get open office to figure whatever tricks MS used to get documents to render fully correctly ONLY in office, consider me in.

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[–] dumnezero@piefed.social 46 points 1 day ago (1 children)

not interested in openslop

[–] partofthevoice@lemmy.zip 34 points 1 day ago (1 children)

So who’s going to go ahead and reverse engineer drop in replacements for all the proprietary tech that keeps these oligarch money engines alive on consumer and business markets for professional software protected by giant moats of development work?

From how I see the situation: same people as before: nobody.

I gladly welcome this AI slop. It doesn’t hurt us. Actually the opposite. This shit is a thorn in the side of the worst companies. Particularly, companies that are also shoving AI down our throats. Let’s shove a little AI down their throats for once, huh?

[–] doubtingtammy@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

So who’s going to go ahead and reverse engineer drop in replacements for all the proprietary tech that keeps these oligarch money engines alive on consumer and business markets for professional software protected by giant moats of development work?

The Document Foundation

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[–] Alpinefolk@slrpnk.net 9 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

The question for me is how this affects the copyright discussion. Microsoft and Adobe have been happy to use and promote AI which has stolen the work of others. When they go after Artcraft, and I’m sure they will, how do they manage to not look like the huge hypocrites they are?

[–] Manticore@lemmy.nz 5 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

I think youre right, theyll try. Though for 'managing', I don't think that will matter. They don't really need to.

The point of being a legislative giant is that your lawyers use whatever angle will work on a technicality for whatever profit goal you're trying to achieve. Often throwing bullshit arguments one after another, to drown your opposition in paperwork, burden of proof or legal fees until they're forced to cave just to minimise losses.

Companies are abstract entities that don't have any actual principles of copyright to be hypocritical about, and the principles of the many people within them are scarcely relevant at scale as their jobs are dependant on compliance to rules imposed above them.

The owners of these companies won't have to manage anything, because they're insulated from consequence and the company is treated as a separate entity, for some reason.

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[–] Sebeck012@feddit.nl 19 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

I love it! Big tech wants control of everything. They put out AI, that they can't control, and we have open source models breathing down their necks. (Imo the worst case scenario isn't AI wiping us out but being entirely subservient and in control of the psycho pdf billionaires)

And now AI is breaking down closed software moats. I really hope this becomes a trend. And it's not like they can get frontier the AI labs to stop this, cos that wouldn't stop everyone else.

Also imagine all the crap analytics and spyware all these closed source software products have in them. Let's decompile every single one and hang the companies with it. Let's reverse engineer every "smart car" software and disable all connectivity. Let's make any IoT device work with Home Assistant. Let's drive John Deer into bankruptcy.

I'd take open source AI code any day over adobe or amazon or meta's shit.

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[–] nullify3112@lemmy.world 19 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I want to coin a new term: Slop’n’source

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[–] x1gma@lemmy.world 20 points 1 day ago (5 children)

While it's pretty funny that one of Microsoft's crown jewels gets shit on with AI, I don't want to start the pro- or contra AI discussion, but what now? They reverse engineered or rebuild, or however you want to call it, all of Office, Autodesk, hell, for the fun of it do SAP next. Even assuming a perfectly working copy, not getting sued into oblivion, and not the dude going into bankruptcy due to Claude token costs - but what now? There is no way they can manage several repositories of this size alone properly (no, claude doesn't count). There is no way this gets the community and traction to self-manage.

Apart from a ridiculous invoice from Claude and proof that frontier LLMs can reverse engineer / clone well (...duh), this is a big pile of nothing.

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[–] prenatal_confusion@feddit.org 28 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Even if these are slop it forces the large ai pushers to make some decisions regarding copyright. I hope.

[–] unitedwithme@lemmy.today 26 points 1 day ago

AI, fucked by the very things its copied off of. If AI companies don't get in trouble, neither should these clones/forks.

Same with pirating content. People only pirate because costs have continuously rose. Otherwise, if it were affordable, no one would need to pirate.

[–] 87Six@lemmy.zip 1 points 15 hours ago (4 children)

Has anyone actualy tried this slop stuff? Does it even work?

[–] NathanRanch@lemmy.zip 3 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Good software doesn't grow on AI. He's going to maintain all this, and keep up rapport before people even want to trust it. Even then, most professionals don't learn on 3rd party stuff cause that detracts from the process itself. Adobe isn't standard because it's expensive or even well made, it's because everyone uses it. This guy's stuff it a toy, it probably "works" but I doubt it's making anyone any money.

[–] 87Six@lemmy.zip 1 points 13 hours ago

True, true, it probably won't ever go anywhere near mainstream. But hey if it helps a guy on a budget, keep track of some stuff on a spreadsheet, without usingn word, I'm all for it.

Tho I wouldn't trust ai slop with important data...

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