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.
None of them work as intended and we already have free options why is this a headline
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.
Comedy gold.
!["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.
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.
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
I want to coin a new term: Slop’n’source
Sloppy sauce
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.
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?
Ok
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.
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
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.
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…
Excuse me, do you call this open source?
For real. I can open source my valueable projects to you. But what if I deliberately make it hard to read, like mangling it or minifying it?
Hell, every piece of JavaScript code on Earth is technically open source. If you can’t read assembly, everything is open source.
Only having the source code distributed is not open source in spirit. The intention of opening the source code is welcoming auditing, learning, contributing, to name a few.
“Opening” the source code of slop, with tons of meaningless boilerplates, non-logical paths and flows, heavily coupled modules and functions, thousand-line long functions, achieves none of the purpose of the intention.
I’m guessing they believe it meets the OSI definition of open source. Essentially that the code is licensed for redistribution.
Does this have tons of meaningless boilerplate and hard to follow call chains? I have read part of the source, and what I’ve seen looks pretty well organized, but if that is how you think the current models write code, you’ve missed many months.
Perhaps that’s the problem. If it’s bad, I can still tell and choose not to read it. If it seems to make sense but actually not, I’m just going to waste my valueab time.
Edit: Just clarified a single sentence.
But what if I deliberately make it hard to read, like mangling it or minifying it?
That you would not distribute the original source code, right? That is A source code, not THE. The generated source code by Claude Ai is THE new source code, there is no higher code generated from it. It is the implementation, the original source. It has an Open Source license. They do not mangle it and distribute a manipulated mangled version and hide the original source code.
What you criticize is the quality of code. But that is not a definition if something is Open Source. By all definitions, the distribution of original source code and a license compatible with Open Source is basically what Open Source means.
Only having the source code distributed is not open source in spirit.
Correct. It requires a license compatible with Open Source, which it is in this case.
“Opening” the source code of slop, with tons of meaningless boilerplates, non-logical paths and flows, heavily coupled modules and functions, thousand-line long functions, achieves none of the purpose of the intention.
This is irrelevant for a definition to be Open Source or not.
There is still a distinction between bad human-written source code and AI slop.
The human holds the copyright of his work and can do whatever he wants with it, including distributing it under a open/libre license, i.e., open source.
AI slop? Not so much. The model is very likely trained on stolen work. It’s tainted. Nobody owns the copyright of everything it generates. No one can “open source” it. The license every one receives is voided.
And both who (intentionally) releases bad code to the crowd lack the spirit of open source, but the AI one is also right out illegal.
I agree with this reply here 100%. My previous reply was just about the fact that code quality isn’t important in discussion of what takes to be an Open Source code or not. Because your previous argument was “it’s bad code, how can this possibly be Open Source” (paraphrased here just).
I also think if you cannot guarantee the process does not involve in any training data from Adobe software, then how can you proof this is really clean room implementation? And besides the fact that if majority of the code is vibe coded shouldn’t be copyrightable, because machines are not humans who has copyright. And to anyone who argues that LLMs are just tools, no, they are not. It’s more complicated than that.
