- Developer Brandon Thomas released WordCraft, GridCraft, and DeckCraft, free open-source clones of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint built with Rust and Anthropic’s Claude
- WordCraft covers 88% of Word’s ribbon features and GridCraft handles 513 of Excel’s 523 worksheet functions, but the team rates both only 50% to 60% ready for real work
- The release follows Thomas’ ArtCraft clones of Adobe’s apps and directly targets Microsoft 365’s $99.99 per year subscription for a single user
Developer Brandon Thomas, the engineer behind the ArtCraft project, has released open-source clones of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint built with Anthropic’s Claude, available now on GitHub. The apps — WordCraft, GridCraft, and DeckCraft — are written in Rust, a language known for speed and memory safety, and run natively on Windows, macOS, Linux, and BSD.
Thomas calls the project a clean-room rebuild, written from public file-format specifications and by observing how the originals behave, never by copying Microsoft’s code. WordCraft reads and writes .docx files and covers 88% of the features in Word’s ribbon, including track changes, footnotes, citations, and mail merge.
Counting file fidelity and stability, the team estimates WordCraft is only about 60% of the way to replacing Word for real work and remains labeled alpha. GridCraft handles 513 of Excel’s 523 worksheet functions plus 89% of its ribbon commands, but its developers rate it roughly 50% ready, with compatibility on real-world .xlsx files still on the to-do list.
DeckCraft, the PowerPoint stand-in, covers about 79% of PowerPoint’s features and 93% of core ones, though it has not reached its first alpha yet. Every button in all three apps doubles as a command that an AI agent can trigger through the Model Context Protocol, a standard Anthropic created for AI models to operate external tools.
Microsoft charges $99.99 a year for Microsoft 365 Personal and $129.99 for the family plan. Free Office alternatives like LibreOffice have existed for decades, but Thomas shipped his three apps less than two weeks after the Adobe clones, working with an AI model.
The model behind ArtCraft, Claude Opus 5.5, launched September 22 at $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens. On Terminal-Bench 4.0, which tests AI agents on complex professional tasks in a command-line environment, Opus 5.5 hit 66.4%.
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