Creator of free Adobe clones unveils open-source Microsoft Office Excel, PowerPoint, and Word replications — Autodesk tools and other subscription-based services may come next
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.
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/microsoft-office/creator-of-free-adobe-clones-unveils-open-source-microsoft-office-excel-powerpoint-and-word-replications-autodesk-tools-and-other-subscription-based-services-may-come-nextOpen linkView original on lemmy.world
170 replies
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.
Yeah, why would you waste time with these instead of Gimp, OpenOffice, etc? Except for the clicks.
i assume this person is making a statement more than anything. but gimp is not an adobe alternative. affinity is but not gimp. but since this is an open source commjnity i should point out affinity is not open source
Yeah, there are already good alternatives for the office package. I don't see why anyone would use a slop version instead of them.
I can't say anything about Photoshop and autodesk since I don't use them.
You've obviously never used Photoshop or GIMP because if you have then you would immediately understand why. GIMP is a completely different experience, and its UX is far inferior to Photoshop. On top of that, anybody who is used to the workflow in Photoshop will have a very steep learning curve using GIMP.
Believe it or not, but most people just want a tool that works for what they're trying to do. These apps have some bugs and rough edges still, but they're very much usable and make it trivial to switch for anybody who's used to Photoshop.
The venn diagram of what GIMP does and what Photoshop does isn’t the singular circle people assume. I, too, loathed my time with GIMP wondering how it ever got so popular in the OSS community, but then you realize it’s kind of all they have so of course they’ll support it no matter what.
I haven’t used it in years and based on that experience, I’m not rushing to try it again anytime soon. The UI felt like a UX designer’s prank on the world.
I've been using the recent versions of GIMP and it's surprisingly usable. Of course tools are a bit different and in different places compared to Photoshop, but that goes for any software.
Yeah, you should definitely try using it again - especially since the big 3.0 release.
Menus and tool names/functions still do not map perfectly onto Photoshop's (it is its own thing after all, so why should it?), but it is a serious and sophisticated piece of software. Easily adequate for my professional reproduction work.
I switched to it from Photoshop two or three years ago and had to spend a few hours watching tutorials and reading the manual to make the transition. But now there is hardly anything I can't do in GIMP at least as fast, easily and reliably as I could in Photoshop.
Yeah, these are very different tools. And yeah UX in GIMP is something else.
I agree, then I remember those infuriating pricks asking "Can I draw a circle in GIMP yet?" in every thread about updates. The slop is for those people.
Is OpenOffice still maintained?
The descendant of it called LibreOffice has been the well-maintained thing to use for the last 15 years.
::: spoiler about OpenOffice: Sadly something called OpenOffice is also sort-of still maintained but should not be used under any circumstances. It has basically been a zombie project since Oracle bought Sun Microsystems in 2010 and (as the Apache OpenOffice wikipedia article explains) is not safe to use:
There is a somewhat complicated history about why the fork from the old
OpenOffice.orgto LibreOffice was necessary and how/why something else called "Apache OpenOffice" came to exist after the fork; the tldr is that Larry Ellison is a real-life comic book villain so his companies strive to do the worst thing possible at every turn. :::Yeah, I know about LibreOffice as I use it myself. That's why I was wondering why OpenOffice was brought up.
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.
I don't think any decompiling was involved here; if it was, Adobe and Microsoft would have DMCA'd it off of github already.
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
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.
LibreOffice?
For an office suite LibreOffice is fine, although compatibility with MS Office is still spotty. But for graphics there really aren't drop in replacements for Adobe apps right now.
At the end of the day, I don't really care what tools software is made with. Either it works well or it doesn't. You can make quality projects using LLMs and you can make really shitty software without them. The deciding factor in both cases is skill ans knowledge of the developer building the app.
Have you seen anyone claiming that this brand-new vibe-coded thing has better compatibility (and/or feature parity) with the proprietary applications it claims to replace than the mature free software solutions currently do?
I would be surprised if it actually does anytime soon.
I agree, if it works well and it's freely licensed it's a good thing. It isn't clear how well this actually works though, and the fact that the author is disparaging existing free software solutions to advertise his business selling genAI tokens is not a good indicator.
It's made it so easy that there is currently a deluge new projects which often seem plausible at first but mostly turn out to actually be garbage upon closer inspection.
It's irrational not to be skeptical of a two-week-old project claiming to be ready (or "almost" ready, lmao) to replace multiple 30-year-old suites of software.
Let me know if I'm mistaken, and anyone other than the author tries it and credibly claims that this thing is actually a better (in any way whatsoever) replacement for MS Office than LibreOffice is.
Given that people are literally just reverse engineering these applications by having the LLM decompile it and observe what it does in memory, yeah I expect these will be compatible much faster than manual efforts. I did something similar recently where I had an LLM figure out the proprietary format for the way my Nikon camera stores RAW files. There's currently no open source implementation for it, and now I can read them using my own library. So, something that used to be a herculean effort before, is something you can now do in a few days using an LLM.
I haven't played with the Office stuff, but I am using his PhotoCraft and LightCraft, and they work fine for what I need. I can process my photos using completely open source tools now that have a UX I'm used to. Yet, I'm aware that LightTable exists, and I've tried using it, and it was not a great experience. Given how fresh these projects are, it's absolutely incredible to me. And with LLMs it's possible for me to fix whatever issues I have with the app myself. The reality is that most people don't really need to do anything incredibly complex with these tools. So, if they do what you need you have an app you can keep using indefinitely. The hard part has always been to build out the initial features and the UX which was just too hard to do by hand.
You're saying this as if NPM ecosystem didn't exist before LLMs. The reality is that there has always been a ton of garbage projects. Over time people gravitate towards projects that actually work and are useful to them. And this isn't hard problem people keep making it out to be. You look at the number of stars a project has, how long it's been developed, how many users it has, and so on. This gives you an idea of whether it has legs or not. I'll certainly trade having to rely on proprietary software for the problem of having too many open source options.
Seems to me that the rational thing is to try the project, see if it does what you need and decide based on that. But that's just me.
Have you seen the creators of this particular project claim anywhere that they decompiled anything? I've seen several commenters claiming that but I think they're incorrectly assuming that that's what they did.
For one thing, decompiling and recompiling Adobe or Microsoft code would surely be viewed as copyright infringement if there isn't a clearly-documented "cleanrooming" process in the middle (having an LLM write a spec (in English) from the decompiled code, and having another session without access to the copyrighted code write new code from that spec - a fun LARP many people are doing lately).
But also, if they were actually doing that then I'd expect more feature parity than I've seen in the few youtube videos I've skimmed through showing these apps. I'm too lazy to find the link now but I watched one comparing PhotoCraft to Photoshop, and one example was that PhotoCraft's Levels diagram is very primitive in comparison to Adobe's (or to GIMP's for that matter).
Congratulations, that's awesome (and I don't doubt it). But implementing a RAW format is a lot easier than re-implementing all of the Photoshop features which are required to be able to say (honestly, a least) "this has .PSD file format compatibility" without a long list of caveats.
I am curious how much you've actually used it. Eg, can you confirm what I saw on youtube showing the Levels adjustment dialog lacking most of the features found in Photoshop's and GIMP's? (Is that still the case in the current version?)
And have you noticed it having compatibility with (or at least some support for) any modern PSD file format features which GIMP lacks?
yes there was a lot of crap before 😭 but don't you agree it's 1000x worse now?
This project has a lot of stars but only because it just got a ton of clickbait press grossly exaggerating its completeness. I assume the vast majority of the stars are from people who have not tried running it. How long it's been developed is... two weeks, as of today. How many users? It's far too soon to say.
I agree with you here! But I'm assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that this particular one is not likely to ever become a particularly good option.
Given how close the project matches the original, I have a hard time imagining this could've been done without examining how the original functions. And whether it's copyright infringement or not is of little interest to me since I view copyrights as being inherently harmful. However, since the implementation is using a different language, that does make the implementation itself a clean room one.
Ultimately, it's a moot point whether they decompiled or wrote a spec from scratch though. What matters is that the apps work and it mimics what Adobe ones do sufficiently well to be useful.
And it still takes time to add features using LLMs. It's not magic, and I'm more amazed how much they managed to add already rather than it not having parity yet.
Reimplementing Photoshop is obviously a much bigger effort, but I'm just using that as an illustration that LLMs are pretty good at reverse engineering work. Which makes it plausible to me that they could get a lot of the features figured out quickly.
I'm not a designer, so my needs are meagre. I want layers, to be able to select objects, add text, do color correction, and so on. Both GIMP and Photoshop are huge, so I haven't had a chance to explore the depths. All I can say is that I was able to get the things I normally do without any real friction. It does appear to work with PSDs fairly well, but again I don't have really complex ones because I use the tool in an amateur way to begin with.
What I can definitively say is that the UX is strictly superior to GIMP. Doing stuff like text manipulation like changing size or selecting fonts has always been a pain in GIMP, and as much as I want to like it, I find it painful to use. Photocraft apes Photoshop UX which I find to be superior. So, the feature parity isn't really the stumbling point for me, it's the UX.
But that's my whole point here, most people are in the same boat as me. They do a few specific things with a tool, and if those things work then the tool solves the problem.
But this is something that'll sort itself naturally over the coming months. If the developer stays active and continues working on it, then it'll keep getting better. If they abandon it and move on then it'll either die or somebody else picks it up. But it is in a fairly usable state as is from my experience, and I'd argue a lot of the hard work has already been done. So, we'll have to just wait and see what happens with it.
Another point to mention though, is that it is becoming viable to maintain your own tools now. For example, if Photocraft got abandoned. It works well enough for me, and I could have an LLM fix any gaps in the way I'm using it. I don't have to maintain a general tool that everyone can use, I can just have one that does what I need.
The barrier before was that you had to spend a lot of time to figure out how any one app works to make meaningful changes to it. And you only have so much time in a day, so you can't really take ownership of a bunch of tools like that. But with LLMs it is becoming much more practical. Grab an open source app, adopt it to work the way you want, and just keep using it. If you ever need new features, you just have the LLM add them in for you.
And if we get to the point where all this stuff can be done using local models, then we really could see Stallman's vision for GNU become a reality. Regular people, who aren't developers, could use fully open source stacks, and they could modify software to work exactly the way they want. If we're lucky this might kill closed source software entirely in the long run.
It is funny though. Microsoft being undermined by the very thing they’re using to undermine working class people.
Funny seeing people losing their shit yet again in front of "AI" claims...
Like all the other spectacular previous claims that is not mentioned: it's a bird with half wings - it does not fly.
I also created a Photoshop clone, the only caveat is it crashes at start, BUT I TOTALLY DID IT!
Did you try it? No. You concluded that if it works, your worldview breaks, so it cannot work.
But someone tried it.
https://lemmy.ml/post/53794973
(Don't look at the post I linked, your fragile worldview can't handle that)
I watched the video (partially because I can't stand it, such annoying video).
So what's your point?? Go use it if that's your turf, don't come around insulting me for no reason.
Do you have a skin in that fame? Why are you so uptight about a vibecoded project? And you are all on the defensive while telling me I have a fragile worldview he he... Projection? Maybe?
There are ton of missing features, buggy ones, crashes.. What's the point of your dummy doing some tests on the slop?
My point was/is: it seems easy to claims victory these days with half a winning battle.
My point still hold, while yours seem moot.
Good day my little world shattering wannabe ;)
I have a simple reason, I hate closed software, I hate adobe, I hate microsoft. Like every real free software advocate.
Did it crash on startup? No? Well then you lied. You lied for adobe, bootlicker.
And of course your worldview won't fall apart that easily, you can always just apply another layer of cope.
If you read again, you realize I am not talking about what they slopped, I was saying that I did mine and it is crashing at start, see by yourself:
That's text comprehension, I am just going to end this charade right aboutttt... Here.
Tbf they're replacing other vibecoded slopware... Can't be much worse than what it's going after - and at least it's free.
I think they'd eat their own dogfood?
I'm pretty happy with libre office. Not keen on AI code
not interested in openslop
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?
The Document Foundation
I’m aware of the the suite including LibreOffice. It’s not popular with exactly the user base we’re concerned with here. Mostly because of aesthetic and integrations. If you dumped a hundred thousand dev hours into it, I’m sure it could find its way there. Otherwise, it’s still an excellent choice for who would otherwise be Linux users anyhow.
However, LibreOffice shouldn’t have to copy Microsoft. It would be ashame if it did too much.
This project, on the other hand, is precisely doing a clean room copy of Microsoft’s (et al) software. Not only does it go further as a drop-in replacement, but it’s also a form of protest in itself.
It's not necessary for LibreOffice to fully replicate every nuance of MS Office to be valuable to people who aren't just those who "would be Linux users anyhow."
Especially for the light users of MS Office, which are the vast majority. They just need something to create Aunt Bobbie's birthday invitation, and they won't care at all whether that thing is MS Office or LibreOffice.
As an anecdote, I'm the IT person at my job. I quietly removed MS Office from a shared PC used by dozens of people. I installed LibreOffice instead, and selected the ribbon UI option. Months later now, and literally nobody has complained or even remarked on it, despite using it every day for their document work. There has not yet been a single instance of anyone contacting me for tech support about it.
None of them work as intended and we already have free options why is this a headline
Anything with AI in it gets clicks.
Exactly. If I needed something more powerful than google docs then I'd download LibreOffice.
most people do not even know that they exist to begin with.
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.
Hmm, I see what you are going for but is "instructor" the proper term? To cut AI out of the picture, let's say the guy instead of paying for tokens paid a team of developers who did the work for him. What would you call the guy then? He does exactly the same amount and type of work in both cases, but obviously noone would call him "instructor".
That's called hiring a team of developers. I believe this would fall under the term producer depending on the situation? If he paid a team of developers and claimed he coded it himself then he'd be called a liar
Yeah, and this is called "prompting some vibe coded software", but we are looking a single word title that applies to such a person. "Producer" makes sense I guess, but did he really "produce" it or did he just tell someone or something to produce it?
Director could be a fitting word, because he directed them to do it. Or plain and simple: Client
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.
Pirating Adobe products was common practice for poor uni students, or occasional users that didn't want to pay exorbitant rates to fix an image here and there. Adobe made that much more difficult. Then you have us Australians that have been getting charged well above the US retail price for years; at one point it was cheaper to fly to America and buy a physical copy.
These slop apps will absolutely let people go back to doing that, and get back at Adobe for overcharging, because the open source tools either don't work with the file formats required, or they just don't cut it. I use LibreOffice & GIMP and they're great, I love them. However, I'm not a graphic designer, and tools like Photoshop leave GIMP in the dust for professional work.
Pirating Adobe and MS products is a practice of Nerds which thought they were hackers, since the existence of alternatives which make useless the piracy of this products.
I don't know where you got that idea. The vast majority of people I knew who passed around a copy of Adobe stuff or MS Office, along with a working key or keygen program back in the day, were most definitely not nerds who believed they were hackers.
I still use my copy of photoshop from time to time.
Photopea has been my go to alternative for opening actual psd docs for a while.
Paint.net was my go to for quick stuff back in windows. I've been learning Kirta on linux now.
But for certain work, the 10 year old copy of photoshop is still better at certain things. Specifically for editing actual photos (go figure).
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
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.
I know it is aimed at digital artists but I highly recommend Krita as a photo editing alternative. Even with it not being the primary focus it knocks all the socks off Gimp. Unsure of psd support though!
Even if these are slop it forces the large ai pushers to make some decisions regarding copyright. I hope.
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.
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?
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.
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?
People have been earning money on free and open source software for decades. Vibecoding is still a ton of work and not everyone has the time or the capacity to do it. Also, add the sentimental element too. Some people still support others even though the can make the same software.
Closed source will be worthless. Open source has already been out in the open and has been amazing. All software will become what it should have been all along and like Stalman wanted it, free and open source.
I hope you're right! Not that I think anyone can predict where this will lead at this time.
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.
Yes but you wouldn't actually need to make your clone very different for the copyright to be entirely different and then surely you wouldn't get sued? And I think in this case, it is definitely sufficiently different, it's a completely different tech stack and while the UI is similar, it's probably not identical (I haven't checked though). But also you can't really copyright UI beyond the design itself, the functionality is free game as far as I understand.
Also worth remembering that different countries may have different stances on this. I'm curious how the EU might handle it.
It's not just copyright. There are also patents to worry about. Those cover a specific process, like "click here, and the code selects all regions matching the same color (+-5%)". If you make an exact copy, surely you've violated some patents.
Sure, patent protections don't last as long as copyright, and they can be defeated if you prove that it's "obvious" or can show prior art, but it's still an expensive legal battle against a megacorp. A vibe coder will likely fold at the first cease and desist.
There may never be a need to challenge Adobe's patent lawyers in court.
This person used AI to clone commercial software, and then released the cloned software. Imagine instead someone developed an AI that could clone most commercial software...and then they simply published the AI open source. Now, anyone can download a tool that can clone software like Photoshop. They can clone Photoshop on their own computer, and that cloned copy never needs to be distributed anywhere.
Imagine Adobe trying to go after people that did that. It would be like trying to go after people that violate a patent for some device that they build in their garage, only use personally, and never sell. Could you in theory go after home tinkerers for patent infringement? Sure. But in practice it's impossible to do at scale. Adobe will never even be able to find the people to sue.
Are you confident enough to bet 6-12 months of dev time and resources(possibly lawyer consultation fees) on that assumption ? because up until recently that's what someone would need to do to find out.
It might be fine, but the threat of litigation is a part of the deterrent.
As with all of these things, it's region specific.
However, game mechanic patents and copyrights exists and are litigated regularly.
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.
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.
ArtCraft isn't a Photshop clone in any sense of the word and it looks like no onr actually tried it. It's a bunch of cobbled together AI tools. "Photoshop" is nothibg but AI prompted image generation and in-painting with Nano Banana (or other providers). It's not reverse engineered photoshop. I spent parts of saturday getting it to work on local modals using Claude like apparently God intended, since I was pissed off that it was a rented service like everthing else in this fucking shit industry.
ArtCraft is an obviously hastily made piece of software that is intended to take Adobe Creative Cloud customers over to their cloud service.
If you want a Photoshop alternative you have Gimp and Krita. Those are well made pieces of software that isn't vibe coded over a weekend.
Hmmm... So if someone used CoPilot, which is owned and operated by Microsoft, to copy something Microsoft owns, like Office, does that mean that no copyright infringement actually occurred, because Microsoft can't infringe on their own copyright?
It seems there may even be an argument that an agent of Microsoft willingly released that code.
You don't even need to use Microsoft's AI, you can use any AI you want that is capable enough for the task.
From a technical perspective, yes. I was looking at it from an angle where the company has released their own code via an agent they control. Sort of like calling Microsoft support and asking "hey, can you send me the source code for Office please?"
Yes. It makes software worthless. People doubt these things but it's done and set in stone already.
AI isn't revolutionary. It's theft.
Massive nothing burger, those sloppy clones are fucking terrible in production, and dont believe me, look it up yourself.
Id love for it to be really of substantial value as it is now though.
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.
LibreOffice is used since years in Spain in companies and administrations
Freecad doesn't click with me so I'll be so excited for an autocad-like project
He already released cadcraft, I haven't tried it yet
CADCraft appears to only be 2D CAD.
Should this be allowed here in [email protected]?
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?
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.)
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?
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'd be willing to bet that it's impossible it could have done it any other way.
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
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 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.
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.
Correct. It requires a license compatible with Open Source, which it is in this case.
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.
The whole clean room thing is weird to me. If an llm room is used at all, how can it be a clean room?
Exactly what I'm saying.
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.
If this came to parity with any of the billion dollar apps it’s trying to replace we would have new laws banning it somehow within a month
If it comes at parity and businesses start using it, then not only it would be banned but also the dev will be sued to hell for "infringing" their "patents" and "revenue loss" caused because of it.
No business would ever use these due to the license nightmare these projects would create.
You don't know Indian small-mid businesses lol. They already pirate a lot of stuff. Adobe and Corel are very strict here—if they find out you are using an unlicensed version of their software, they send legal notices to pay a shit ton for the damages and buy the licensed one for a lock-in period before even suing. Most, if not all, give in because there is no way out of this. Yet a lot of them are willing to take this risk as the potential savings are much higher than the losses if caught.
If these businesses get a grey zone free product, they will happily switch. Big corpos will mostly not.
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.
I don't think this is proof.
It's proof that they can make something that appears to reverse engineer / clone well.
To really know, we'd need to use it as daily drivers long enough to give it a good test. And it hasn't been out long enough for that.
From previous experience we know that LLMs are great at confidently producing plausible output with problems that are hard to detect and fix without expert level knowledge and experience.
What experiences exactly? Whether the output is correct or just plausible and how many and how severe the problems are depends on the actual problem, and this statement is way too broad. There are also enough experiences where it works. It depends on how you use it.
I don't see too much of a difference between a LLM producing plausible output as the result of reverse engineering and a human engineer producing plausible output as the result of reverse engineering. Again, we're not talking about absolute experts doing this for the past 20+ years spending months to do this. For a "regular" engineer doing this, it's the same best guess.
This is the big difference between AI boosters and normal people: most of us have experienced many times when the AI was confidently wrong and don't like it as a result.
"creator" my ass
I want to coin a new term: Slop’n’source
Sloppy sauce
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.
You'd still need hardware access to install that software, presumably? Surely it would break some sort of warrant. Also, as much as I despise connectivity in smart cars, I'm not sure I'm comfortable having AI code injected into my car. Then again, the car companies are surely already injecting AI slop into every single new car these days... Maybe it's not such a bad idea after all. It's rough, but we gotta fight slop with slop.
Even with access to the car hardware would it be impossible to just flash a new firmware onto it, not without some major security flaw in their bootloader or leaked keys to sign the new firmware. It is all locked down tightly.
Blood in the water for Adobe. Acrobat is a steaming pile of garbage. My org worked with their engineering team to track down a bug that we reported. They affirmed the bug (app hangs on launch) and then took four to five months fixing it.
I've worked in software engineering. I know that debugging, patching, testing, verifying is difficult. But the enterprise license costs a lot and that was a very long time with a crippling bug. The only satisfactory answer (to me) is that they don't feel urgency because they are entrenched without real competition. They need to wake up.
(No, I don't think vibe-coded Acrobat replacements will unseat them. I think LLM-powered real devs will come for them because the moat is smaller.)
Yeah man but did you see the "Turn it into a podcast" button???? Great stuff!
It's where the lines intersects with how much it would cost to fix it and how significantly the bug impacts their revenue.
Its a matter of priority. If you are big contract to them and threaten to cancel over this bug then it would move faster.
I don't think this is going to amount to anything; the rate he's popping these out suggest he's more motivated by making a point and/or prestige than getting something useful at the end, and turning these enormous codebases nobody has any intuition for into something maintainable is going to be grueling work that will make them wish they started from scratch. But if we imagine that this will go somewhere:
Wouldn't that be bad for open source in the long run?
Businesses, certainly not the larger ones, are not going to touch this for various reasons. So while Adobe and Microsoft may take a hit, it's not going to fundamentally harm their business models. Students, on the other hand, can't afford the real thing. If that leads to them to alternatives like LibreOffice, GIMP, or Krita, then when they end up in the workforce, there's going to be at least some pressure to let them use the tools they're used to. In fact, I use LibreOffice at work. But if they can have something that looks and feels exactly like Adobe's and Microsoft's products, they'll feel right at home with the real thing at work.
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.
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.
What is it that makes excel so exceptional?
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
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......
You can prey LaTeX from my cold dead hands....
Valid
Where's the legal limit?
If I use AI to make and sell a Ford truck, will Ford sue and we can get precedent that AI use is still a copyright violation?
AI itself is theft
Only 99% of the time.
It's possible to build models on only copyleft data, and include all relevant attribution
Just brand it fjord
You wouldn't download a car?
I have and I will
I don't really think that copyright is the major issue here, but patents. Adobe has a metric tones of patents and the rebuilds will most likely conflict with a some or even lots of them.
if you didnt call your truck ford or used patented stuff
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?
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.
I mean, the problem isn't that they'll look like hypocrites...
The problem is that the bullshit they spout can be used against them in court.
For instance, some of these companies are on trial for using copyrighted works for training. One could claim that the training of a model is fair use. One of the criteria for establishing fair use, is that it doesn't damage the market for the original work.
But their email claim they think LLMs can effectively damage the creators of the content they use, and they publicly repeated over and over how their AIs will make everyone unemployed.
Now they could say that they bullshitted the public, but then MSFT is a public corp, so that might be considered market manipulation? And indeed Microsoft has walked that back earlier than most others.
Either way, bring popcorn to watch the legal teams do backflips.
That's easy- software patents.
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.
isn't Artcraft's products vide coded?
and yep they are
ngl its impressive Claude can replicate programs
Man, imagine the financial crisis vibe-coded Excel usage will cause.
Looking forward for the coming months to see if any of these programs can have all the bugs ironed out
Spoiler alert: They won't.
They could go straight to the nuclear stuff and make a liberated version of Oracle's VirtualBox. Would become as popular as Robin Hood.
Okay. Do Unigraphics NX. I would totally use that.
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 psd file, and i know many controllers at finance that need their macros which wont work in other excels.
Has anyone actualy tried this slop stuff? Does it even work?
Tried the PowerPoint clone. Opened our corporate template and hit present. Presentation mode runs sluggish as hell. OnlyOffice is way smoother by comparison.
Uninstalled it right away.
Narrator: uninstall didn't fully work, and he's now infected forever
Eh, it's the work laptop. It's an Ubuntu machine, so it feels kinda wonky and bad right after install anyway.
Yea performance is probably the Achilles' heel of ai slop in general. Interesting
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.
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...
Situation sucks because I would use Libreoffice if the UX wasn't some dogshit pooped out by a backend FOSS guy in his sleep
Seems fine to me. I have no issue with it. Seems the same as everything else really. I go from docs, to word, to writer and it makes no difference. Or calc, cells, and excel. Whatever.
Do you often struggle with numbers and letters?