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.
might be slop, but it is a solution. i know not stomping on the little indie projects like gimp is the perfect way, i know governments should follow germany and ditch microsoft, but here we are. code probably can be untangeld, and implemented to other projects as well, so the ui might feel familiar, and compatible with every format.
we all know well that most of the time a designer has to send the pad file, and i know many controllers at finance that need their macros which wont work in other excels.
None of them work as intended and we already have free options why is this a headline
True. I think it’s greater value is being an AI middle finger to specific proprietary software. Especially if they incorporate and mainly focus on AI these days. As well as encourage it’s use as a magical new tool.
Anything with AI in it gets clicks.
I think (from a layman’s perspective) that these would have far more potential if they didn’t fully commit to the “100% from scratch reimplementation in Rust, btw” bit. Especially for this Office suite, where a wealth of options already exist that they could build upon (LibreOffice, OnlyOffice/EuroOffice, Collabora Desktop) for more proven support of these formats.
That said, I hope they decide to vibe clone Clip Studio Paint someday, then there’d finally be an open-source tool that can open .clip files. And maybe that could even allow someone else to implement the format in Krita, GIMP and the like
FOSS clones for software just to work on closed overengineered standards is stupid. We have had markdown for decades but still prefer oblong zip-xml files for writing rich text and slides!? Absurd.
Excel is the only MS Office product that makes sense to exist, and thus carries the brand to dominance largely by itself. Docs and slides have already been solved; I wish devs just focused on making the perfect Excel clone and abandon looking at all other MSOffice programs.
Why doesn’t the dev rather work on specific features sets on one existing project instead of building half baked fleet of slop.
Yeah, ArtCraft is very poorly made. It’s a bunch of AI tools jumbled together and is basic at best. It also buys into the entire Tech feudalism bullshit by being a cloud service.
Open source tools for all of these use cases have existed for over a decade and people still buy both adobe and Microsoft office. I don’t think some slop apps are going to change that.
I’m a Microsoft hater but I don’t think this will changes the wider publics opinion on them?
Open office and libreoffice have been around a good while now.
30 years after switching to Linux, I still have to use Photoshop because the gimp is still trash.
I played with PhotoCraft, it launches on less than a second, and while still missing features and isn’t even a 1.0 release yet, it’s better than the gimp already.
And it opened all my psds perfectly.
We still don’t have a good alternative for prepress production media. I’ve seen some workarounds, but Adobe is the only actively developed option feature complete for this use case. Mostly because the chances that prepress workers and offset printer operators are also FOSS fiends and developers abysmally low. Prepress is such a small industry too since most people don’t really care if their print media looks like shit
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
Comedy gold.
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.
!["cat looks inside" meme template: "[...]", "looks inside", "slop"](https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/0cbd3492-56c9-4d38-9555-d561d93411c3.png)
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?
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?
Not sure where you get the idea that I posted this as a marketing ploy reselling genAI tokens?
Sorry if it seems like I meant to imply that that was your intention; i did look at your profile before asking and saw that you aren’t a spammer :)
However, it seems like reselling tokens is the primary business model of the company which has presumably just spent a significant amount of dollars worth of tokens to vibe code this suite of software.
Whether they have actually produced a dozen useful apps which many people will actually use, or merely made something which is just barely functional enough to get a bunch of free marketing hype, is not yet clear to me. They have certainly succeeded in getting a lot of press, though.
I’ve used the photoshop clone, I’m not a digital artist so I don’t really know much, but it worked ok. I’m sure with time it’ll get better. I’m also using the word craft one and this one works no issues at all. Also on this one I don’t really do a lot of docs but I did some stuff on it and it worked fine
The second twitter one is infuriating
“Come on, y’all know this” is the best they could come up with to argue that their slopware is better than these long established huge open source projects that have been worked on for decades as opposed to a week
Honestly there is a good chance the LLM ripped code from the long standing projects to cut corners.
Great, more slop
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.
It’s very obviously better to have open tools than closed ones. This whole screeching about slop is both incredibly tiresome and irrational in the extreme. These are new tools that make software development easier, people are making useful things with them, and they’re helping people move off proprietary software. That’s obviously a net positive.
If you don’t like the tools people are using go ahead and make something comparable by hand, except we both know that you can’t. So, you’re adding nothing constructive to the discussion here.
I don’t understand why anyone is interested in using these. They simply look like the real thing. There is nothing indicating they work remotely the same under the hood.
If you were to generate a bug for bug copy that would be one thing, this is just a doppelganger.
Were it made with Ai or not, its just not something that has any real value.
Decompilations do work the same under the hood.
Have you tried it to say that it just looks like the real thing and that it doesn’t work the same?
It isnt even written in the same language. It won’t be a bug for bug copy. Just slop.
I don’t need to buy the Temu knockoff to know it’ll be s shitty knockoff that looks good on the storefront.
Buy?
It’s a metaphor.
Ok
I want to coin a new term: Slop’n’source
Sloppy sauce
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.
FOSS communities probably won’t form around most of these projects, as you said. Assuming the software can be managed by a few people with LLMs, likely local in the very near future, it’s quite possible that plenty end users who didn’t use FOSS before would jump on these instead of paying money to MS or Adobe. That in itself is a huge win for the majority. Depriving MS from revenue that is. Then for community FOSS, this has potentially significant positive implications about our biggest challenge - dealing with proprietary formats and proprietary blobs. This could mean perfect .doc/.docx compatibility in LibreOffice. It could mean a perfectly working nouveau driver for NVIDIA GPUs. How about fixing the tons of bugs we workaround in motherboard firmware. Or fixing that corner case in Wine so it can run your fav obscure game. Or reverse-engineering communication protocol of cloud-connected IoT to integrate it in Home Assistant. Etc. Etc.
In short: FOSS is a social activity. Assuming this method can produce very good source from binaries, that itself won’t create FOSS communities, but FOSS communities can use it to significantly improve the FOSS they care about.
While I personally think you are right, I don’t think that any “serious” FOSS project will use sources from a fully LLM generated project.
This is good and bad at the same time…
Well, there is no lack of good OpenSource Office suites out there, most made in Europe, LibreOffice, Calligra, OnlyOffice, CryptPad, Euro-Office, ZetaOffice. Collabora Office, Murena Workspace…
