Vibe-Coded Microsoft Office: WordCraft, GridCraft, and DeckCraft, Tested

0:13The vibe-coded app-clone scene is going "completely insane," and FUTC (a CS student/developer with mixed feelings about it) builds and tests the latest batch. 0:36In his last two videos he covered the ArtCraft team's seven Adobe clones in pure Rust; now he's found the same team ships Microsoft Office clones too — and he's dying to try them. Same deal as the Adobe batch: not piracy, but clean-room reimplementations — someone studied how the finished app behaves (what happens when you press this, what the app does after) and rebuilt that behavior from scratch, in 100% pure Rust, without looking at the internals.

The Office clones

1:07The three Office replacements, all by the ArtCraft team:

• WordCraft → Microsoft Word
• GridCraft → Excel
• DeckCraft → PowerPoint

1:23He flags the legal grey zone up front: clean-room on the code internals, but "copying the exact UI" — which you can see in the screenshots — is "skirting the line really, really finely." Not his call, not legal advice; he's just happy to try them. And he builds them from source, because he's on Arch Linux and likes the idea of having "Microsoft Windows, or something very close to it, on Linux."

WordCraft, tried

2:54WordCraft (v0.3.0, via GitHub releases — an MSI for Windows, a universal DMG for Mac) compiles and opens fast. 3:52It opens a sample document that "looks exactly like Microsoft Word," with bibliography support and templates — enough to make him nostalgic. 4:57Then he makes a resume and hits the first real bug: a stubborn italics toggle — he hits Cmd+I to turn italics off, types, and it's back on again, over and over. Tables and equations insert fine (the equation is "impressive" but can't be edited), but the classic Word killer — text on the left, image on the right — still dies: the text ends up underneath the picture after wrapping. His verdict on WordCraft: 8:07"it's got a pretty long way to go."

GridCraft, tried

8:31GridCraft fares better — he calls it "already way better than WordCraft." The bar chart and pie chart render, and when he edits a cell the chart updates automatically. 8:57Trend lines work, autosum/subtotal works, remove-duplicates works, and chart types toggle between bar/donut with a legend and monochrome option (though monochrome only recolorizes one chart at a time — another bug). His summary: "this worked better than WordCraft, I would say… a lot of stuff here is really solid."

DeckCraft, tried

12:42DeckCraft ships the most concrete roadmap claim: it covers ~79% of PowerPoint's features by breadth, ~93% of the core ones, and is "roughly 80% of the way to a first alpha." New presentations, new slides, bold, and a working animation pane (float-in, play-all) all work. 14:40But it's laggy — every action takes a few seconds — the animations are crude, and at one point it crashed and Claude restarted it into "presentation one recovered." He also couldn't figure out slide-to-slide transitions at first (they're under "transitions," not "animations" — as he sheepishly notes, he hasn't used Office in years).

The agent-native angle

10:13The genuinely interesting part: all three are agent-native, with an MCP server built in — a connection point that lets AI use the software in a completely different way than a human would. In GridCraft, he ran Claude Code, pointed it at the GridCraft MCP server, and told it to make a new document with random data ("money is fake anyways") — it generated fake sales figures and a chart on its own. 16:21In DeckCraft, Claude added a slide element to test the connection, then — asked for "heinous corporate crimes" — cooked up an entire deck of corporate-satire slides in 52 seconds ("Renamed layoffs a talent liberation journey," "Paid the Q3 bonus pool in exposure and branded lanyards," "Invested the pension fund in an NFT of the CEO's yard"). His speech-to-text sanitized "crimes" into "transgressions," and Claude retitled it "Q3 Learnings." The takeaway he draws: the internet is so saturated with corporate jargon that the models can produce it on demand.

The verdict

20:24Should you download these? Not yet. They're "very, very early, and it shows" — the Adobe clones (covered in his prior videos) were more solid, having had more development days behind them. 21:03His sharper point: we don't actually need vibe-coded Office copies, because mature open-source alternatives already exist — LibreOffice, free and years into development, "gets you a lot farther than a vibe-coded app that's only a few days old." The Office suite has a LibreOffice; the Adobe suite had no equivalent free/open rival, which is why those clones were more exciting. He'll revisit when it's more mature — the Rust + MCP-native foundation is still genuinely cool.

Claims checked

Sources & further reading