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

[u/Miserable_Phase_2519]

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-next

[u/EngFL92]

Begun, the clone wars have.

[u/likamuka → u/EngFL92]

Microsoft should have been split up in the 90s for what they have been doing to the internet and the PC market. They were rewarded, instead, with more monopoly.

[u/adenosine-5 → u/likamuka]

Remember when Intel was finally sentenced for their blatantly anti-consumer practices and bribery?

It took so long and the fine kept getting smaller and smaller, that in the end, Intel got more money out of it, than they paid in fines. So not only they didn't pay fine, they literally got paid to break the law.

[u/Luvs_to_drink → u/adenosine-5]

when breaking the law is nothing more than a small fine, it just becomes the cost of doing doing business

[u/hayden_evans]

This is the only thing that will make big tech rethink their approach to AI - when it starts to decimate their bottom line.

[u/anon377362 → u/hayden_evans]

This is why Amazon blocked Muse (Meta’s new AI agent) because it bypasses the whole Amazon ad system that generates $60 billion/year. But Amazon is releasing its own shopping agent, which will no doubt be tied into its ad system somehow.

But if you use an AI agent from your own device, it can browse Amazon fine and look up all sorts of great deals, without you having to see any ads. Amazon has been a mess and a joke for years with the amount of ad and promo spam it has so it’s good that we don’t have to deal with that anymore.

[u/DHFranklin → u/anon377362]

This is the thing everyone is missing.

Private personalized software ecosystems. The SaaS companies and advertising companies and surveillance capitalism are going out to pasture if everyone realizes that they can spend an hour or or so and make it happen. Not everyone uses adblockers, but those who do will likely keep a personal AI layer on their devices to push out the others.

[u/wonklebobb → u/DHFranklin]

the future of big business IT is owning hardware, i think everybody knows this which is why they are pouring trillions into data center buildouts

[u/me34343 → u/wonklebobb]

I could also see more hardware having restrictions on applications that are allowed to be installed. All applications must be able to be verified as approved. If you want to make your own application you have to pay a subscription to allow it be on the white list.

[u/Luvs_to_drink → u/me34343]

hahahahaha hahahahaha

there exists a giant ecosystem of linux ditributions or someone could make ai build a new os that bypasses all of these new limits.

[u/Left_on_Pause → u/DHFranklin]

How long until AI companies put watermarks into their code and hardware manufactures bake in blocking of software without validated (subscriptions) watermarks? If MS can enforce using only theirs or paid for home brewed software, they can control, make profit, and prevent competition. The US will happily legislate that into being, so will the AI players. At some point, they just make having a personal PC useless except for playing legacy games.

[u/hypercosm_dot_net → u/DHFranklin]

A large majority of people aren't shopping with AI agents though.

Any competing product that uses agents are going to run into legal barriers.

[u/tnoy → u/hypercosm_dot_net]

"A large majority of people aren't shopping online."

-Someone at a time when Amazon was just selling books.

[u/myhv → u/DHFranklin]

Those who use adblock will not want an advertisement intelligence on their system.

[u/unsuitableasf → u/anon377362]

I don’t use Amazon but maybe once a year and last time it was ridiculous how many pages of bullshit ads and copycat items I had to scroll through to find what I was looking for.

[u/uponloss → u/unsuitableasf]

Which is what Amazon used to be great for, search for something and the thing you wanted was there and would be genuine. Now its a gamble if you get a fake item or not

[u/J_Landers → u/anon377362]

On a similar note, Microsoft has anti-scanning efforts on LinkedIn to prevent people from pulling jobs from their board without their tracking efforts.
 
I run a Claude agent to scan other companies and boards directly; then populate into my own dashboard to look and see what looks promising and what company is continually a dumpster fire/under pays/etc.
 
I still keep LinkedIn for now, of course, just in case recruiters reach out for jobs.

[u/FarplaneDragon → u/hayden_evans]

Except it won't. On the consumer side 99% of people will never even hear about this stuff, let alone use it. LibreOffice has existed for years now and hasn't hurt Microsoft in the slightest, this is going to be no different because your average person has no need to seek it out.

On the business side it won't matter either. Companies like Microsoft already shifted/shifting licensing setup into things like E5 licenses, which means if your paying for Windows licenses, you're getting some form of office products with it so there's no real cost savings to ditching the official software for this stuff.

Add to that that a lot of companies weary on using open-source stuff like this because there's usually no real official support if you're having issues, there's potentially security issues that may or may not get patched in a timely manner and you've got no service contract so if something happens in general, you're SOL.

The only people that's it's going to effect are the companies that see this, think it's going to be a quick way to save a bunch of money, cancel their existing subscriptions or chose not to renew their contract and switch. Then 6 months later when everyone is frustrated, things aren't working and they have 0 support they'll go back to Adobe/MS/Whoever, expect worse because it'll be a new contract starting at the current rates which will almost certainly be higher then what they paid previously.

[u/loopala → u/FarplaneDragon]

LibreOffice has existed for years

I have seen people use an LLM to modify Blender source code to add a feature that already exists as a free add-on.

There is a weird psychological component where people are creating something tailor-made for themselves. They don't even research if it already exists, and they prefer making their own than learning how to use the design of someone else.

So I don't think people will switch to this guys clones, but they might build their own if they can one-shot it. Instead of paying for a feature or software that does what they want but in a different way and also does other things they don't care about.

[u/Wyntier → u/hayden_evans]

(Just a gentle note that nobody's bottom line is being decimated right now and the free Adobe sucks at the moment)

[u/Immatt55 → u/Wyntier]

*The paid abobe fucking sucks and still has critical bugs reported over 14 years ago on forums and this is a paid program.

[u/lampishthing → u/hayden_evans]

It's different big techs, though.

[u/_commenter]

maybe that guy should focus on making his clones work... I think the thread was removed from hacker news but when this person announced the adobe clones people on hacker news installed them and then railed him in the comments because they were buggy as hell.

... and as other have mention there are already some viable open source projects.

seems like this dude is just trying to drum up hype for himself.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49981449

[u/m00shi_dev → u/_commenter]

This should be higher up. My first thought was “but does it work?”, and of course it’s riddled with bugs.

[u/SakuraKoiMaji → u/m00shi_dev]

Something many don't know, and may even refuse to know, is that for software development implementing a feature is just the beginning.

It may be one thing to make one 'clone', one can really invest in it which means investing time to test, debug, polish and more.

Many however? I go all-in on 'It's slop'. Software development sure can be accelerated but one can't outsource all competency.

[u/Geno0wl → u/_commenter]

Vibe coder having extremely buggy software and vastly overstating its capabilities? They would never!

[u/darkslide3000 → u/Geno0wl]

I've never heard of this project, but the whole premise of "one guy remade all the Adobe tools for free, now he's tackling Microsoft" is ridiculous. Each of these programs, even something as "simple" as Word, would be a big effort for a team of engineers to recreate even to the point of basic features most people expect. A single guy making a competitor to Photoshop is entirely laughable. Projects like LibreOffice and GIMP have existed for decades with many contributors and still suck too much to comfortably switch to.

[u/TheTomato2 → u/darkslide3000]

You see people on this very thread buying into the hype. It's a circus.

[u/Vevaseti → u/darkslide3000]

Looks over at Photopea. Except that's been worked on for over a decade.

[u/stormdelta → u/Geno0wl]

No kidding. AI tools are impressive for software, but they aren't magic and it's a little alarming to see how many idiots who very clearly have no programming/software background are upvoting this idea they can vibecode something from scratch overnight like this just because it looks vaguely right on an extreme surface level.

The tools are significantly more effective the more you already know what you're doing.

[u/sarcasticbaldguy → u/_commenter]

I've tried the adobe clones and at first you're amazed at how much it looks like the real thing, but for real world workflows, they're shit.

[u/Mikina → u/_commenter]

This. I tried it few days ago. Wouldn't let me create a canvas of the size I want, just defaulted to 1080p. Tried some random stuff, and when I alt-tabbed once, the thing was frozen and I lost my work, even though I did save it once beforehand.

It's barely works. And the fact that he just keeps pushing out even more random software, instead of actually focusing on making single one work, speaks volumes about him.

That guy does not have the attention span required to maintain a FOSS project. It's obvious that he is already bored with the Adobe ones, hence why he's starting more projects, probably because he's high on the attention it is getting him but does not have the willpower to actually focus on something for longer than pulling a slot machine lever a few times.

[u/Theron3206 → u/Mikina]

Making one work would require way more effort than making 5 more buggy "clones".

The saying usually goes that the last 20% takes 80% of the time, but it's way worse than that with AI, and unless you were careful with how you had the AI structure the project (probably not), fixing even small bugs will take a lot of tokens.

And that's just for bugs others find for you, if you have to actually QA the product you need actual people doing that, and they usually want paying.

[u/apolotary → u/Mikina]

> the thing was frozen and I lost my work

Ok but this feature is a faithful recreation of Adobe products

[u/TotesGnarGnar → u/_commenter]

That was my experience with the few I installed. They look good. Have most of the same features but things like key commands and just overall workflow is garbage. 

[u/Beastmind → u/_commenter]

Hard to when they stole code from others. Apparently from photopea.

Edit: Found the link back https://selfh.st/weekly/2026-10-09/ . Part about it is written

[u/meltbox → u/Beastmind]

Jeez every time I think that they may be making legit progress it turns out it’s in the training data and it’s all bullshit. Every damn time.

[u/ExZowieAgent → u/meltbox]

That’s all LLMs are though. It’s just a remix of something that already exists. They don’t produce anything that’s novel.

[u/Expensive_Finger_973]

There is something kind of funny that something meant to stab at the heart of one of the pillars of Microsoft's money printing machine is being hosted on one of their other pillars.

[u/Ueli-Maurer-123]

After our previous story covering ArtCraft, we have since discovered that u/ai_art_is_art is Brandon Thomas, a highly talented software engineer with 15 years of experience under his belt. After his ArtCraft project became popular, many criticisms followed about vibecoded software and AI slop, to which Brandon responded on his X account that he does know how to code, further defending himself.

The way this article is worded makes me laugh. It reads like a school article written by somebody who admires the guy two classes above lol

[u/srirachaninja]

LibreOffice has existed for a long time and is actually pretty good, so there's no need to vibe code this anyway.

[u/OkPear1535 → u/srirachaninja]

Libre always seemed slow and clunky to me

[u/MrMadras → u/OkPear1535]

This has been experience as well. Pretty inconsistent with styling as well. Microsoft word has been snappy, consistent, and intuitive in comparison.

[u/wubbbalubbadubdub → u/MrMadras]

Microsoft word is so snappy that it'll move all your stuff around if you ever put an object over a table, until you disable move object with text and some other default enabled checkbox.

[u/FRESH_TWAAAATS → u/wubbbalubbadubdub]

yeah but.. fast.

[u/hey_you_too_buckaroo → u/MrMadras]

We have documents that are 250 pages and longer at work. It absolutely crushes any computer that tries to open it in Word. I'm talking 30 seconds to just scroll or search for text. Word is not fast.

[u/MrMadras → u/hey_you_too_buckaroo]

My laptop is 4 years old at this point. 16 GB Ram. My novel is 450 pages long. Opens effortlessly. But then again, mine is just text with chapter headings. That's all. Does your document have a lot of objects in it?

[u/TheRealSheevPalpatin → u/MrMadras]

Probably SOP’s with images

[u/MolinaroK → u/srirachaninja]

It has been installed on my pc for longer than I can remember. Never had an issue using LibreOffice. Works great.

[u/HakimeHomewreckru → u/MolinaroK]

For anything that was created using LibreOffice, yes. But when you get docs from other people actually using Microsoft Office, layouts get completely F'd up for me. I still use it, but the output always looks different.

[u/lexfestt → u/HakimeHomewreckru]

I trust Microsoft and their history leads me to believe they would never do anything ever to stifle competition like intentionally fucking up compatibility with another tool that threatens their entire business model.

[u/maetl38 → u/lexfestt]

LibreOffice devs have written a lot about this. See most recently https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/09/17/libreoffice-26-8-and-interoperability/

Basically, MS ignores standards and creates their own solutions, so it's nigh impossible to fully replicate them in different software.

[u/fortune82 → u/maetl38]

I had to recover a corrupt Excel doc at some point like 2 years ago, and the ONLY tool that could even open it was LibreOffice. I found out at the time that LibreOffice more closely follows the Excel / .xls / .xlsx standard than Microsoft does.

[u/glacierre2 → u/HakimeHomewreckru]

Remember when office PC documents were not fully compatible with office Mac SW and viceversa? Cut libreoffice a bit of slack, office formats are a dumpster fire.

[u/SpaceSteak → u/HakimeHomewreckru]

That was true many years ago, now most docs are fine. Maybe some issues on truly esoteric designs for Word and ofc complex Excel is its own thing.

[u/SunTzu- → u/SpaceSteak]

And even if it were still true, a vibecoded replacement wouldn't make that compatibility problem better.

[u/totallyrealname → u/srirachaninja]

It's more about the message, I think.

[u/NaiveMessage2025 → u/totallyrealname]

This is the first iteration of Will Smith eating spaghetti. Have we all already forgotten how much that's improved in a short time?

If not this particular project some others will come along with better code and better features. At some point soon they'll reach feature and performance parity.

The message seems to be: you stole the entirety of human knowledge for profit and taught it to code. Now we're going to use it to make your for-profit software obsolete.

For-profit software developers like Autodesk should be shitting their pants right now. You better believe the second a good AutoCAD clone comes out their subscriptions will fall off a cliff.

[u/soundman1024 → u/NaiveMessage2025]

Subscriptions from corporations will stay until this works through the courts.

[u/DrVonD → u/soundman1024]

Also this only affects personal use. Enterprises require enterprise support, and no amount of free is going to move them off that.

[u/NaiveMessage2025 → u/DrVonD]

I don't think it'll move the needle for the Fortune 500 level enterprises, but there are a lot more Mom and Pop sized companies that absolutely would drop their Autodesk subscription if they could.

I worked for one for over 20 years. We had a dozen employees. I was the CAD guy. We maintained an AutoCAD sub because it's the gold standard, and required to do business.

If we could've had a clone with feature parity and seamless integration with other Autodesk products for no subscription we would've.

[u/SunTzu- → u/NaiveMessage2025]

The problem is that people who don't get why it was hard for LLM's to produce a video of Will Smith eating spaghetti. It's not that it was innately harder than anything else, it's that there didn't exist much relevant training data. When it became a "test" of how advanced it had become, it lost all relevance. People started recreating the meme, which got fed into the LLM's. Will Smith even recorded a video of himself eating spaghetti. Of course the LLM's got massively better at performing this task.

Now go ask the LLM's to create some new absurd scenario that has never been depicted. It's better now than then, but it's still going to make basic mistakes because it doesn't possess a theory of the world. It doesn't know physics so it doesn't simulate how the spaghetti dangles off the fork. Instead it relies on existing video. Feed it a bunch of video where the spaghetti dangles upwards from the fork and it'll start showing that instead.

[u/Antique-Historian441 → u/srirachaninja]

So has gimp and it's various plugins. I don't understand the hype on some vibe coded replacement when and open source replacement has been around for decades

[u/jodudeit → u/Antique-Historian441]

When people say Gimp is pretty good, I have to wonder if they've actually tried Gimp, or if the application has really gotten that much better in the eight years since I last used it.

[u/DeliveranceXXV → u/[deleted]]

^{^} correct. Gimp can be incredibly powerful but sometimes is not user friendly for (long complained about) basic functions.

[u/Cormophyte → u/[deleted]]

Audacity is going through this. It's really just a matter of biting the bullet and making the switch. Leave the old UI accessible and make the new UI the default for new installs with a "Do You Still Want This Old Bullshit?" dialogue after the first relevant update.

[u/omniclast → u/[deleted]]

For quick stuff I end up using Windows' built in Snipping Tool or the Mac OSX screenshot editor (which is helpfully hotkeyed) since it skips the step where I even have to save the file

[u/wazzuper1 → u/jodudeit]

Even with the plug-ins and keyboard shortcuts setup to mimic Photoshop, it just wasn't pleasant. But I also haven't used it in 10 years since Photopea worked fantastically in a pinch.

[u/insaniak89 → u/jodudeit]

It's fine, but it takes way more fiddling

Krita was better and easier to use

I think gimp has a lot more plugins and is probably better if your editing professionally because it's been around longer and has more community support

[u/cold-vein → u/Antique-Historian441]

If you've used both Photoshop and GIMP you'd understand what makes a 1:1 free clone of PS so appealing.

[u/ObservableObject → u/cold-vein]

Recently reinstalled GIMP to give it a whirl again after a few years. I'm still not convinced that GIMP isn't an Adobe-backed psyop to make Photoshop look like it's worth the money.

[u/Jingocat → u/Antique-Historian441]

GIMP needs a complete and absolute rebuild of its UI/UX from the ground up. It is the perfect example of why 95% of coders should not even attempt UI. There are UI experts for a reason.

[u/tigg → u/Jingocat]

Yeah it's crazy.
https://i.postimg.cc/x80zV3tv/image.png

Photoshop does it the right way - open files in tabs across the top of the program, tools on the left hand side and layers on the right. But as you can see, everything is completely wrong in Gimp - the open files are spread across these crazy "tabs", all the tools are cramped into this left hand sidebar, and the layers are banished all the way to the other side of the program.

It's nuts.

[u/Expensive-Sundae-831 → u/Jingocat]

I've always been fascinated how UI's for indy-built programs are kind of like a window into the soul of a coder. You really get to see how convoluted their rationality is.

Been looking at that stuff since the 80's. It's funny/sad.

[u/deong → u/Antique-Historian441]

I've never been good enough at Photoshop to have a qualified opinion on gimp, but I'm very familiar with Lightroom, and you could say the same thing about darktable. It's been around for a while as a capable replacement. Except it isn't even close to being a replacement because its UX is just a nonstarter for almost every possible user in the world.

Libreoffice is better as an alternative to Office, but it still looks and feels like shit because it's written in java.

UI/UX matters. Familiarity matters. That's why people get excited by things like this. "You can cancel Adobe and not even notice" is just a qualitatively different pitch than "You can cancel Adobe and only have to learn something new and weird and rebuild your entire workflow".

[u/starliight- → u/Antique-Historian441]

Gimp is okay for the average person, but a lot of people who use photoshop are artists who draw and paint. Swallowing shards of glass is probably more fun than using gimp for serious artwork

[u/EnthusiasmOnly22 → u/srirachaninja]

Sorry but its really not, the interface really drags it down and started flashing and glitching on a clean install on me once a couple years ago. People woiuld move to Google Docs or iWork before Libre

[u/GrowlingPict → u/srirachaninja]

Yes. Most free alternatives to common paid tools are... "pretty good actually". Theyre never great. Theyre never a true replacement.

[u/Green_Ad5186]

i tested photocraft,wordcraft,and effectscraft.

they "work" but aren't good to use yet. if this project will take off. it needs to actually be as good as real ones and not repeat the mistake of trying to be its own thing like libreoffice or gimp did.

its using opus 5.5 so i expect it to get very good very soon.

[u/StrangeWill → u/Green_Ad5186]

The fact that the Creator is making new projects instead of working the massive backlog of items reported as issues, hundreds of segfaults.... I think says it all.

Also didn't the Adobe clone have a significant amount of lifted code from another pre-AI Adobe clone?

[u/Stefan2142 → u/StrangeWill]

He likes to build and doesnt like to repair

[u/CountSheep → u/StrangeWill]

Big question is if he’s an actual dev or just a vibe lord. A real dev will have trouble parsing this all still but can at some point fix issues, the problem with vibe coded apps is it’s like taking over your co-workers project who left word salad notes.

[u/FZeroXXV → u/StrangeWill]

What are you talking about? There was literally just an update 10 hours ago. There have been multiple updates for the past week. https://github.com/storytold/photocraft/releases/tag/v0.7.0

[u/StrangeWill → u/FZeroXXV]

Sorta -- projects still need attention, we get merges for OpenClaw that has just become a mess of automation and constant code churn.

We just released an update 10 hours ago but we have over twice as many issues since the last time I saw the repo, including a ton of new basic crash reports that most importantly: didn't exist before (same flows worked without crashing).

No one is testing this, it's all just blind merges and let the users sort it out.

That isn't "attention" that's just "if it compiles, merge it" (with some form of clearly not good enough automated testing) blind loops.

[u/JuvenoiaAgent → u/StrangeWill]

No, I'm certain the "developer" has made code quality the number one priority! He probably reviewed every one of those "466 changed files with 44,620 additions and 4,111 deletions" in between the release of 0.6.0 yesterday and 0.7.0 10 hours ago... (/s just in case)

[u/United_Grape_2772 → u/StrangeWill]

I'm not convinced these open source alternatives are stable enough for professionals to use either

Software follows a complex development life cycle.

Having AI generate a ton of code that isn't thoroughly vetted, tested and battle proven is going to lead into stability issues, bugs and potentially long term growth issues where old foundational bugs become harder to fix without extensive rewrites, causing devs to choose between new features development etc

Frontier AI is good but still isn't that great yet that it can handle everything in software development without any human input

[u/BocciaChoc → u/FZeroXXV]

oh my, that sure is alot of different contributors adding wildly different things all over the place. I do wonder how the review process goes for these or if that's also mostly outsourced to AI? I might give it a year or two because I'd not be willing to run it on my computer.

[u/StrangeWill → u/BocciaChoc]

how the review process goes for these

There effectively is none.

For vibe-coders: They hate doing QA \ For engineers: They also hate doing QA

AI can help, but I've been using frontier models for awhile and things get caught by QA entirely depending on my own care and review. I've tried many techniques, along with studying what others have done. No one has a bullet-proof method, and most people claiming things like spec-driven development reduces it are just being clowns (me QAing spec-driven work always results in piles of issues).

[u/myhv → u/FZeroXXV]

Yeah, a "bugfix" that added more bugs that it solved. It's obvious there is no quality control, it's just pure vibe and commit.

[u/kinboyatuwo → u/Green_Ad5186]

It needs to be as good at the base functions. The bloat in most office suite are things that are edge case.

[u/Green_Ad5186 → u/kinboyatuwo]

strongly disagree. "bloat" is subjective. it should reach feature parity. not aim for some fictional minimalism.

[u/gildedbluetrout → u/Green_Ad5186]

Thats why i don’t think this is real. It feels like Sora in that flash in the pan sense. It’s one off cowboys largely, and they have no real control or QC over code or feature stability. It feels like a convincing mirage. As much as the features, you’re paying adobe for rock solid large scale deployment across teams in time critical production environments.

[u/sgtlighttree → u/gildedbluetrout]

The only apps I can see being actually useful long term are the Lightroom (non-classic) and Acrobat clones since they're comparatively simpler. The After Effects clone is good but unless it can somehow achieve feature parity, plugin support, AND somehow more stable than the real thing, yeah.

[u/gildedbluetrout → u/sgtlighttree]

Yeah but again - when I was freelance, the reality is that a day and a half’s edit/mograph work paid for the year of Adobe. Thats fucking nothing. You want to see people getting raped on subscriptions - try autodesk customers.

There’s no sane working professional trusting their livelihood to vibecoded software from some fly by night cowboys when the entire commercial post production sector in London runs on creative cloud. It’s just not fucking happening. Im on contract now and our studio runs on creative cloud. Every studio is. Every freelancer we bring in is adobe prem and AE.

Christ half the rebrandings these days invariably have their font come out of adobe fonts. That bank of fonts is kind of one of the more important parts of CC imo. No one wants to pay for a fucking Hoefler font. We all use the adobe bank.

When say I’m retired would I spin up an LLM clone Lightroom to noodle with my photo library over a CC subscription tho? One hundred percent.

[u/fofo314 → u/Green_Ad5186]

It amazes me that several years into the LLM craze prople still haven't gotten wise to the fact that LLMs can vibe code a shitty, incomplete app but fail at making a somewhat large, finished product.

Creating a GUI that kinda looks like Word or Photoshop and does something similar to those programs is easy. Creating feature complete, stable.software isn't.

[u/whyisitsooohard → u/[deleted]]

Genuinely curious, how do you measure them being really good? I think it's fairly impressive that they got it running, but I can't really judge how good it as I'm not using photoshop professionally and looking at code it looks like project has serious lack of testing which is very bad for ai developed projects

[u/Dr_Backpropagation → u/Green_Ad5186]

PhotoCraft is in early alpha, others aren't even in alpha. Let alone beta. The only point in testing them right now would be to report bugs or contribute.

[u/mqee → u/Dr_Backpropagation]

These apps will never come out of alpha. What's the development pipeline here? Who's doing bugfixes? Are we just waiting for AI to be able to code and debug at senior developer level? If that's the case, these apps will be outdated as soon as that AI comes along, and until then they'll be a buggy mess.

[u/Kobosil]

WordCraft is in alpha. It covers 88% of Word's ribbon features with commands today; counting depth, file fidelity, stability and the rest, we estimate it is about 60% of the way to replacing all of Word for real work, about 55% for a typical professional's weekly work and about 63% for everyday essentials. Beta needs testing against real-world .docx files, keeping charts and SmartArt through a round trip, pagination closer to Word's, a stability sweep and native printing.

wake me up when any real company uses one of these clones in production

[u/threedogdad → u/Kobosil]

they won't, they're already using free Google Docs.

[u/esther_lamonte → u/threedogdad]

Yeah, was anyone out there who needed a word processor and not pay for one actually struggling to find a no cost alternative? If so, they are stone cold dumb as hell.

[u/Slackeee_ → u/Kobosil]

wake me up when any real company uses one of these clones in production

No real company will move their production software to some vibe-coded hobby project that likely will go unmaintained in a few months when the "creator" won't be able to fix the bugs or even understand the code.
You don't just pull up some multi-million code line projects in a few weeks out of a glorified text-completion algorithm and think that it's even close to production ready.

[u/wonkey_monkey → u/Kobosil]

It covers 88% of Word's ribbon features with commands today; counting depth, file fidelity, stability and the rest, we estimate it is about 60% of the way to replacing all of Word for real work, about 55% for a typical professional's weekly work and about 63% for everyday essentials.

Trouble is I don't trust someone who vibe-coded an app not to "vibe-generate" the statistics.

[u/Theylikedumbdumb]

Existing, mature, "free" alternatives:

Photoshop: GIMP & Inkscape.

Lightroom: Darktable

Office Desktop: LibreOffice

Collaborative Office: Collabora (R.I.P. OnlyOffice)

AutoCAD: LibreCAD

Fusion: FreeCAD

I have personally used all of these except for LibreCAD and I can say the functionality is there, and the user interface is 99% there.

Edit: thanks for all the comments, there are many other good free suggestions there so take a look!

[u/griffinwords → u/Theylikedumbdumb]

Inkscape is a vector drawing program like Illustrator, not a raster drawing program like Photoshop. Otherwise I agree with your suggestions.

[u/JoeThrilling → u/Theylikedumbdumb]

Darktable is fine for editing but doesn't have the file management or catalogue features that lightroom has, unless they have added that.

[u/tokenutedriver → u/Theylikedumbdumb]

I mean gimp is just not there, dark table is okay but doesnt have the same polished work flow

[u/Straight-Opposite-54 → u/tokenutedriver]

GIMP is a graphic design/photo editor software designed by engineers for engineers, not graphic designers/photographers, and it shows. I appreciate its existence as FOSS, but it is excruciating to use for its intended purpose lol

The Affinity suite is the real "free" (as in beer) alternative to the Adobe suite. Familiar workspace, same non-destructive editing flow, and the same powerful tools exactly where you'd expect them to be. It's close enough that you can even follow many Photoshop tutorials in Affinity Photo without issue.

[u/Noblesseux → u/Straight-Opposite-54]

It's also kind of a classic example of FOSS kind of ignoring matters of UX/UI because the types of people who volunteer for projects like this are engineers.

[u/franticfrogfriend → u/Theylikedumbdumb]

GIMP and Inkscape are universes apart from PS/Illustrator or even Affinity in a professional setting.

The same goes for FreeCAD, the UX is SO MUCH worse than Fusion.

I'd love if open source alternatives were mature enough but they very much are not if you use the software professionally, IMO. For hobbyist work - maybe, but I'd still prefer to use Affinity over Inkscape and GIMP. The workflow is just so much better, unfortunately.

The only creative software that is actually starting to be a viable alternative to commercial offerings is Blender tbh, and maybe Krita for digital drawing (although the PS ecosystem for drawing is unmatched IMO).

(I do agree that all of them are so much better than this bug-riddled vibe-coded PS clone, though, lol)

[u/CaineBK → u/franticfrogfriend]

Yeah, Blender slaps.

[u/Alexandre_Man]

Opensource Office already exists, it's LibreOffice or OpenOffice

[u/mugiwara_no_Soissie → u/Alexandre_Man]

True, office is the wrong approach here. The reason its prevalent is because group editing is a thing which they have a monopoly on. Photoshop is a different matter since its prevalence is mainly due to people being used to it

[u/teedock]

Should copy the 1990s versions that actually functioned well without bloat 🫪

[u/ExpiredLink404 → u/teedock]

can't you still pirate those?

[u/Interesting_Phone171]

Open source alt to office have existed for decades that’s not why people keep using offce

[u/Ok-Parfait-9856 → u/Interesting_Phone171]

The PS clone can’t even do basic functions. All of this is bullshit hype

[u/FuzzyWumpleStump]

Fuck big tech. This is the monster these idiots created. Just a snake eating it's own tail.

[u/Emotional_Solid6538 → u/FuzzyWumpleStump]

Use the stones to destroy the stones

[u/Various_Weather2013]

Since it's open source, I see foreign governments taking the source and making their own versions now. No need to keep using an American corporate product

[u/Th3MadScientist]

They already have this. If anything contribute to the LibreOffice project.

[u/AwwYeahVTECKickedIn]

It's time to enshitify enshitification! LET'S GOOOOO!

[u/Capt91]

No one will transition without enterprise support.

[u/BootyMcStuffins → u/Capt91]

No companies will transition

[u/ThaDon]

LibreOffice right now: uhhm hello 👋

[u/CaptchaSolvingRobot]

Oh the beautiful irony. They stole everyone's work and now Microsoft's IP is being stolen while China and PewDiePie is distilling their AI models.

Maybe karma does exist.

[u/olorol]

I swear this slop is being astroturfed. There's like 20 posts about it on every tech subreddit when it's vibe coded crud.

[u/Briggie → u/olorol]

Also viable alternatives to adobe (like affinity/canva) already existed.

[u/meneldal2 → u/olorol]

Probably helps that there is a lot of legitimate hate for Microsoft and Adobe helping those posts get traction

[u/lzwzli]

Did the Internet just forget that all these alternatives already existed before this AI slop version??

[u/PatchNotesMan]

I wonder if there will finally be more litigation over AI now it is hurting tech companies in a tangible way

[u/cyesk8er]

Won't this also happen with models. If one company produces a new model that's significantly better than all others, how long will it take other models to just copy it

[u/Simple-Diver-2192 → u/cyesk8er]

That's called distillation, that's why they are fighting that hard to prevent chinese models from distillation.

[u/dendrocalamidicus → u/Simple-Diver-2192]

How dare they train their model on the output of my model that I trained on stolen copyrighted content?

[u/wimpires]

Tech companies when they steal everyone's IP to train their image and video generation models: 😴

Tech companies the moment someone uses that same IP-stealing model to copy their software: 🤬

[u/qualityintelligence]

libre already exists, and it's probable Claude and similar trained with LibreOffice, so starting that vibe means internals will probably be quite similar, better approach would be to clean up the existing libre calc UI a bit, just be a contributor? it's pretty great as is but could use some refinement. having now a third doesn't sound that interesting.. maybe if it's full macro aligned but again, do that in libre if you think you can

[u/Lambs2Lions_]

This is all slopware / shovelware. It’s completely unusable garbage. There’s actual free or paid but cheaper alternatives.

[u/scavno]

Do people think big companies are idiots who just waited for a free alternative? Who do you keep accountable here when something goes wrong? Who provides patches and fixes?

It’s the same problem with LLMs everywhere. Solid engineers are not a bottleneck LLMs solved. I’m so done.

[u/Powerful_Resident_48 → u/scavno]

Adobe for one can't be bothered to fix anything anymore. 

[u/Hartzler44 → u/scavno]

Google sheets has essentially been free for years and nobody I know uses it in any serious Enterprise capacity. Libre offices also been free for years too. These AI tools aren't going to change anything.

I work in tech and from my experience the tool itself is never really the issue. Convincing people that they need to change their workflows and patterns -even when they're doing something stupid- is much harder

[u/cpteric → u/Hartzler44]

I am sadly not lying when I say many of the most complex systems in tech, biz and banking are held in place by an overstretched Office 97 .xls or .xlt

[u/janora → u/Hartzler44]

Its not just about changing the workflow. Imagine some accounting department starts using this vibeslop and it calculates something wrong, who do you blame? Or Scientific stuff? civil engineering? The "creator" will just shrug and say "its open source, better verify it yourself next time" while claude is rewriting the whole backend for a fifth time.

[u/Quick_Turnover → u/janora]

Also, all of the functional arguments say nothing of the supply chain risk. I work in Cybersecurity and holy shit, we're struggling to keep up even with enterprise software that is widely adopted and supported. Solar Winds anybody?

[u/Shark7996 → u/Quick_Turnover]

The software installation requests coming through have been absolutely mental. Oh yes, I will definitely allow this end user to be the first one to start fiddling with Claude on the company network because they asked nicely.

People have zero clue what these things are capable of. It's like a bunch of kids wanting to play with a flamethrower.

[u/Quick_Turnover → u/Hartzler44]

My favorite thing is actually being knowledgeable about an industry and seeing all of the Redditors give their two cents on shit they know nothing about. This thread is the perfect example. (To be clear, I'm agreeing with you).

[u/OldeTimeyShit → u/Hartzler44]

I’ll add to this that many teams don’t have a user support function. If you roll out of homebrewed tool internally at a larger enterprise, there’s gonna be people screaming at all hours of every day about problems with it.

[u/MandingoPants → u/Hartzler44]

Uhhh, we are a publicly traded company and use google workspace in its entirety....

[u/eseffbee → u/scavno]

100% People working as a head of IT are not just waiting for some poorly supported, likely insecure AI-built app by one guy to replace MS Office.

Maybe these things will work for consumer level, but not enterprise level (where these companies make most their money), unless they actually scale up these new apps with full development teams to provide customer support, patches and security upgrades, at which point hey, what do you know, now this software carries a subscription cost in order to deliver that...

Not everything that involves a subscription is a scam. If you have ongoing needs in a changing environment, the model simply reflects what people need.

[u/prima_maqueeria → u/eseffbee]

LibreOffice and quality open source alternatives already exist

[u/Nikoladge → u/prima_maqueeria]

And even those are shunned by the enterprise market

[u/rwilcox → u/eseffbee]

> likely insecure AI-built app by one guy

One guy who - if the’re trying to replace even more software - probably won’t support it for very long, moving on to the next thing to clone/get kudos for.

A focused person who bootstrapped it up with an LLM then focused on it for 5 years, building product and community? Sure, might get acceptance - everyone runs curl after all - but this behavior? Unless this guy has literally infinite tokens, and even then, I don’t care how much you believe in GasTown, it’s for “for the hype” not the replacement.

(At this point I almost hope the dude decides to do it with Disney+ or something, just to see exactly how many lawsuits, and exactly how fast, pile onto the guy)

[u/dabenu → u/scavno]

Lol you seriously think even one photo editor ever got to hold Adobe accountable for a photoshop feature not working? That's not how the world works.

The age of software as a service is dead. And I for one am glad that it is. What comes in it's place (the age of AI?) might be arguably worse though.

[u/TheHeretic → u/scavno]

When's the last time Microsoft has been held accountable for any of the damage they've done with their buggy hackable operating system, their hostile OneDrive upgrades deleting data when people don't have enough space, etc...

[u/ic_97 → u/scavno]

Thats always a thing with open source softwares. But i think this is good in the sense that folks who can't afford those softwares can get started with this. Also not to mention these companies are shit themselves when it comes to support.

[u/herakleion]

For context, I work at autodesk. All these giant companies are pushing extremely hard on AI adoption as if its a first movers advantage, and not self replacement.

For people not working in tech, this might seem as a crazy hedline, something good, or so something super exaggerated. Its not. Its really absolutely crazy and theres almost 0 jobs that are not impactes by AI. Some people will say a crazy thing like X thing that is super niche and dangerous, but its only until robotics catch up.

I'm scared for my job, I'm scared for my role, I'm scared for the thing I enjoy doing. I'm scared for my kids future. Like what do they even need to learn? If no jobs who earns money? Who pays for things? Whos even getting a coffee in that world?

I will read people saying its like the invention of the steam engine or the car. Its definitively not. Its every single revolution all at once. Social, economic, technology. All of them. 

No industry is safe, No company is safe, no job is safe, no profession is safe. Pick the most random thing you can imagine, ask yourself if its not about to get trampled by ai.

Might be a blessing in the long run, but the amount of despair and inequality something as " you can now clone anything anytime and you dont really need anyone anymore, just do it solo" is a sad world.

Anyways, its a wish for the best kinda scenario... Maybe its time to go back to hydroponics

[u/scrooch → u/herakleion]

Hey I got into hydroponics during the pandemic too, until my garage started getting moldy.

I work at a fortune 500 company as a software engineer on an open source project. I've been in software professionally for about 20 years. LLMs are really good at things where there are tons of examples of them, not so good at novel things. Things like image editors have tons of examples online. Also the bar is different between releasing a free product and releasing a product with support. This is why things like Blender aren't the industry standard (side note: I love Blender).

I work with agents and contributors using agents all day. I'm not so concerned about an agent doing my job. Because I know it can automate the drudgery of my job, but can't do my job. The bigger risk to my job is executives convincing themselves it can do my job. I imagine a situation like the Twitter layoffs where they had to scramble to hire back talent.

[u/Cheap_Flower_9166 → u/herakleion]

You’re right. And the biggest difference between then and now is LLMs by their very nature eat their children.

The funny thing is they have no moat. You can switch easily among them. LLMs don’t want an ecosystem of applications surrounding them.

They eat their children. When they get big enough.

[u/AcadiaWorried1865]

Gotta keep the media buzz going somehow. I don't think wasting tokens on more barely functioning projects is particularly sustainable when neither of the Adobe slop clones still aren't 1:1 to the original programs.

[u/Large_Yams]

Open source alternatives for all these things he's making already exist, and already work well. Maybe just contribute to their projects instead of vibe coding shitting clones in a day and a half each?

[u/MegaSmegmaSwagLord]

Lmao pop the fuck off.

AI really is a fuck around and find out kinda thing.

[u/InterestedBalboa]

Sure that’s nice and all but who’s going to maintain it, improve it and fix bugs? Not today or tomorrow while it’s shiny but in 12 months time?

[u/Hysterical_banana → u/InterestedBalboa]

Watch it get left in permanent alpha. AI is great fir making MVPs but polishing is a real grind. People behind it are clearly interested in hype first. (Funny how it all coincided with Anthropic's upcoming IPO)

[u/mugiwara_no_Soissie → u/InterestedBalboa]

I mean its open sourced, so anyone?

Linux kernel itself also has some AI used for maintaining, it sure as hell is being maintained lol

[u/NoSuchKotH → u/mugiwara_no_Soissie]

The linux kernel is actually a very bad example as it is a huge outlier. Around 80% of the kernel developers are directly paid by their employers to work on the linux kernel. Which is a humongous amount of money flowing towards a single OSS project. And this does not account yet for all the compute infrastructure they are running that is also being paid by companies.

I don't know of any other OSS project that has so many developers paid by do many different companies. Most projects, if they haven't grown out of an internal development anyway, struggle to find just even one paying company. Just look at curl. There are more devices that have curl installed than you can even imagine (basically anything that has network connection in some form or other has curl installed, including small industrial control systems, dish washers,....). Yet Daniel Sternberg is basically the only maintainer and has to regularly remind companies that if they want to solve their probems, then they need to pay him and can't expect it for free, just because it's OSS.

So no, just because it's OSS does not mean people will maintain it.

[u/Achenest]

I dont get why they arent contributing to existing FOSS replacements

[u/themixtergames → u/Achenest]

Because the maintainers hate vibecoded PRs, which is fair, but that's the reason

[u/2ChicksAtTheSameTime → u/Achenest]

A big part of this is shamelessly cloning the UI as much as they can. Most FOSS projects have a "soul" and make changes to how things works etc, they design their own features and lay the UI how they think is best, making switching to them harder.

This guy's goal seems to be 100% cloning existing apps without needing to do any new spec or design work for the UI and feature set.

[u/undeleted_username → u/Achenest]

Because they cannot do that.

This was not made by someone who understands what they are doing, this is some AI reverse-engineered monstrosity. I bet they will be sued by Adobe and Microsoft, because there will be copyrighted code in that software.

Contributing to an existing FOSS software requires understanding what you are doing. Bedsides, they would miss their fifteen minutes of fame.

[u/SteinsGah → u/undeleted_username]

Don't forget Patent infrigment. Lots of office and Adobe features are patented. Even small things like button layouts. A 1:1 copy of the features is a legal nightmare.

[u/b_a_t_m_4_n → u/Achenest]

Why do OnlyOffice developers not just contribute to LibreOffice?

[u/Dragongeek]

Autodesk

Don't make me laugh. CAD is one of those capital-H "HARD" problems where bringing the geometric kernels to where they are today literally involved probably millions of hours of PhD level intellectual labor. It's gonna take a couple more years before someone's able to meaningfully slop together something functional here.

[u/Detharjeg → u/Dragongeek]

It's the opposite. Open source geometric kernels and simulators has existed for a long time, and for CAD you can get FreeCAD right now.

The commercial packages provides better UI, tooling and documentation - and someone to blame. Due to a lot more exposure to end-users, literal edge-cases (like bevels and bools) are also more ironed out in the commercial kernels.

No serious company is going to jump ship from Autodesk or Solidworks the second a vibecoded alternative exist. It is fair to assume these alternatives might get a lot more attention from the hobbyist community in time.

[u/CrookedK3ANO]

LibreOffice, GIMP, Blender, DaVinci, use actual software instead of this half assed slopware

[u/M-Kuma]

Just use LibreOffice instead of this fucking slop.

[u/seclifered]

There’s already open source alternatives to office

[u/humanitarianWarlord]

Not a hope theyre going to make actual replacements for any of autodesks products.

A photo editor is one thing, a CAD program is a whole other rabbithole.

[u/Twoscales22]

Good they’ve been trying to make money off of the same software with minor changes for years. Subscription based payment was robbery.

[u/whyisitsooohard]

What's with promotion of this projects? They are not nearly in the usable state but already touted as a full adobe projects replacements. And now MS Office and Autodesk comes next. Some kind of paid campaign?

[u/ShankThatSnitch → u/whyisitsooohard]

headlines to get clicks and views.

[u/Sypheix → u/whyisitsooohard]

Yea it's definitely coordinated. And while these products might be good alternatives in the future, they aren't right now

[u/PrideQuick670]

Adobe and Microsoft don't have multi-million dollar legal budgets for nothing. They will shut this down rather quickly I suspect.

[u/SourSovereign → u/PrideQuick670]

Under what claim though? It is not stolen and they have no monopoly on a desktop text editor like Word. How would they argue in court that someone made competition?

Microsoft didn't go for Google Docs either. Adobe also let Affinity and Canva alone. Autodesk can't sue Blender either.

[u/enobrev]

I tried the Photoshop clone. It was a slow, buggy mess. I couldn't fathom spending more than 10 minutes using it to get something real done, much less all day for work. I don't have high expectations for the others either.

Yes, you can generate something that looks the part Quickly. Good software still takes time to get right, even if you're not writing the code yourself

[u/David-J]

While it may seem good, big picture wise, this is terrible.

Edit.

All software and apps are up for grabs. For example, a solo game developer spend 2 years making a game and it gets cloned and released within days. It will destroy any creative endeavor to create anything new if it gets cloned and released immediately.

Edit 2. I posted a game development example but it would also apply as well to other creative industries as well as any software development endeavor. Think about the big picture instead of I hate Microsoft because it's cool to do that. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of jobs and many industries that are being severely harmed by the AI bros.

[u/ithinkitslupis → u/David-J]

The alternative so far has been corporations striving to use AI to make a K shaped economy with a more obtuse angle. I'm not really sure how that would be better for normal people.

In the absence of any real plan by most governments to protect anyone from the fallout as AI improves, it's nice that some wealthier people might have to start thinking about the downsides of AI lessening their moats as well in this very specific case.

[u/EndlessPotatoes → u/ithinkitslupis]

Whatever solution lawmakers come up with will definitely make the K-shaped economy worse.

Protection from AI will be solely to the benefit of the wealthy, sadly.

[u/RedditsChosenName → u/David-J]

Not to mention security and feature updates. I know it’s easy to laugh it off considering the targets, but you have to think beyond just the companies that deserve the hate.

[u/MajorFuckingDick → u/RedditsChosenName]

Cybersecurity is so funny to me because no one would let a 6 foot smelly man with no shoes on into their home without caution. They would let that file onto their computer though.

[u/alaksugalkapenalatte]

They should have spent those tokens improving the Photoshop alternatives. We already have open source alternatives to the office suite

[u/jedipiper]

Nah... I'm ok with real open source software made by people who understand code and software design.

[u/kur4nes]

Because there aren't MS Office alternatives already.

Oh boy. Doesn't sound good that he is creating one new project after another.