Developer Releases Free Office Clones Built With Help From Claude

Atlanta engineer Brandon Thomas has posted free, open-source replicas of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint to GitHub, expanding an effort to create alternatives to subscription software with help from Anthropic’s Claude.

The projects are named WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft. Thomas’s company, ArtCraft, describes WordCraft as an unfinished Word alternative, GridCraft as a pre-alpha Excel replica and DeckCraft as an early PowerPoint replacement.

ArtCraft lists WordCraft with 87% coverage of ribbon commands and about 62% feature parity with Word. GridCraft is listed as covering 93% of Excel’s worksheet functions, while DeckCraft covers about 79% of PowerPoint’s feature set and is 80% of the way toward its first alpha release.

The projects remain works in progress. WordCraft’s roadmap identifies missing or incomplete handling for charts, SmartArt and embedded OLE objects when DOCX files are loaded and saved. Its documentation also distinguishes between whether a command can be launched and whether it behaves like the corresponding Microsoft feature.

The Office projects follow Thomas’s release of open-source alternatives to seven Adobe applications, including replicas of Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere. Those projects were built with Claude Opus 5.5 and the Rust programming language and remain in early alpha.

The broader project has drawn criticism from people who dismissed the software as AI-generated “slop.” Thomas responded in an Oct. 9 post on X: “My guy, I can code.”

The releases give users free code-based alternatives to widely used office applications, but ArtCraft’s own completion figures show that the projects have not reached parity with Microsoft’s software. The repositories remain the primary way to access the applications.