Has anyone of the people spamming these apps by storytold on HN actually tried any of them? I know that any new software can have bugs, but the ones here are really not acceptable for a release, let alone labeling it a 'reimplementation'. The quality of the software is just very embarrassing to anyone who might have used any of the originals, or at least can assess basic software qualities. I have tried some of them and really everything is buggy, a lot of options and buttons make the whole thing crash, the UX is very poor compared to the originals. I tried some of the clones of Adobe's apps, and they just don't work. I tried wordcraft as of writing this, it does not work and it is even more buggy than my experience with photocraft, changing a text to a headline made it just crash on my M4 MacBook, after making it VERY slow and unresponsive for 3 minutes.
It is extremely far from a working solution for someone who uses these apps for just casual non-professional use. For professional use, I borrow Wolfgang Pauli's "not even wrong" to say it is not even something to think of. People who think this is a possible replacement just don't have a clue about how big a software like Photoshop and MS Word are, and how much they actually provide their users with.
I know that "Hey I open-source'd Adobe and Microsoft" can get people some hype on TikTok and Twitter, and maybe have some media reporting about them for fun, but I am really surprised that people here are passing on these like they are really what they claim to be. Genuinely, if anything can be used as a counterargument for the promised LLMs revolution, it would be software like this.
Like everything in this stupid, hype-driven AI industry, it's always the "easy" 80% that is done; the actually-difficult final 20% is always waved off with vague future promises.
I see what you're saying, but we're just getting to the start of it being worthwhile to do something like this. Once these projects have people testing them and proposing changes/improvements (AI driven), I don't think it would be long until they are on par with, if not better than the originals.
The only catch will be if attention coalesces around an individual project instead of hundreds of people vibecoding their own versions.
That's fine, but why not make it clearer that they're extremely early alpha?
Their websites look more polished than the apps themselves, have download options for non-technical users, and in no place that I can see (as of writing) do they mention that they are early development: https://getartcraft.com/apps/wordcraft
In "the before times" it was at least the norm to place at the top of a github repo and download section "this is early alpha" or similar to not let down potential users. This project currently seems like a great way to burn user willingness to try new apps.
These apps have to be astroturfed, right? Like I get the desire to give Microsoft and Adobe the middle finger and I guess it's somewhat impressive these apps even do anything, but man are they such buggy pieces of trash. Like you said, I downloaded the Word clone and it's broken in so many ways that I can't even describe what the bugs are. In 5 minutes of messing around, I hit so many random and inconsistent failures of basic functionality like styles, image resizing, and table formatting. Plus the UI is atrocious. All the downsides of Windows apps mixed with all the downsides of a weird cross-platform UI framework.
Storytold apps are a gift, and are setting the precedent for AI apps. Everyone was wondering about the relevance of open source in post AI era, and here we have it: a magnitude more ambitious ecosystem.
While Bun proved at-scale rewrite, these are proving huge at-scale re-dos of the entire software ecosystem.
I suspect 24 months from now the landscape of daily software is going to be vastly changed.
Note that they're currently a buggy mess in my experience. That's not unusual for an alpha, but I'll personally wait to call them a gift until I see if the team is capable of polish+reliability. I do think their marketing is ahead of their product at the moment.
And they are already really useful, even in an extremely buggy alpha state. LightCraft is already working pretty well for a photography hobbyist like me. Can't wait to see the state of this software suite in 6 months.
I'm curious about this part. As a user you're finding them extremely buggy - what kind of bugs are you seeing?
It sounds like you're expecting the bugs to be ironed out in six months. I guess I'm wondering if the same process that led to buggy software in the first place can actually be used to get rid of the bugs without creating more.
Well, in the case of LightCraft, some basic things like processing raw photos. It seems to be struggling with processing them compared to older software, it's kinda slow and glitchy. But it's in a really early stage, support for the CR3 format (the one I need) was just added like 2 days ago.
I don’t think it’ll be “the same process”. Someone has to identify the bugs and instruct the LLM to fix them. I doubt that can be automated with GUI software as it stands today - there’ll be a lot of human involvement even if the LLM implements the fixes.
With a human in the loop, iterating on bugfixes can work. It’s just more human-labor-intensive than an initial implementation.
I suppose you could invite users to submit bug reports, give them some guidelines on how to write them, and then have an LLM monitor the bug reports and fix them. But then I think you’d be more likely to see the creation of more bugs, as you say.
In the issues page of the repos you can see avg type of open source bugs. For the Word clone there is: spellcheck doesn't work, image embedding is broken, etc.
As a Lightroom user, I've tried _many_ times to use Darktable, and I've given up every time.
Like so many open source GUI projects, it's clear they have solid technical developers who are building good underlying tech, but they have no one on the project doing any kind of user research or spending time thinking about what good UI/UX looks like.
I do use it sometimes! But I dislike the UX. RawTherapee feels better, but it still feels weird compared to Lightroom.
LightCraft is basically a Lightroom clone, so everything feels familiar and standard. The problem is that a bunch of stuff is still missing and/or buggy.
Why not use LibreOffice which is already open source? I'm just trying to understand what we are solving here and why do we need a 1:1 of some other tool while existing tools which are much refined already exist?
I’d assume to try and be a simpler replacement for those already used to Word, like my father. He absolutely hates Word and Microsoft but he does not want to switch because he has been using Word for the past 20 years.
Of course, the quality of this is nowhere near good enough, but in theory :)
These apps are awesome, but they make me a little nervous. I can just imagine when a "clean room Rust" Oracle DB (re)implementation hits GitHub that Oracle would not just sit there and take it but would instead rain lawyers down from the sky... Ditto for other companies that have hornet's nest legal departments.
python libs written in rust under hood is a good source of rustish domain specific best practices too … if you are ok to see lot of “unsafe” code and clever tricks
Just create a blueprint with specs and architecture decisions, software cycle, with product and research docs, plus other needed docs like legal or such, and always use it to make the code. Don’t use memory because the way it gets called by the model isn’t good, and for any updates make the model update the specs too. That’s what I do and the output not just consistent but also future proof for updates or revisions or audits.
Why make a clone when you can redo the whole dang UI? Sure we'd like WYSIWYG, but I am absolutely convinced now in my 34th year of computer use that I don't want a GUI with a bunch of toolbars and dropdown menus that is laid out by decades of cruft accumulation.
While they may be a buggy mess, I think it's really interesting that we're starting to see this unfold in real time. People have been forecasting these kind of changes for the last few years, and it seems like it's actually happening now. Really curious to see where this goes, if everyone has their own custom fork of some common codebase for specific features/needs they have across these base applications.
The entire Excel implementation is under 50 MiB. The Word one is under 90MiB. Insane. I'm sure the features are incomplete, but both can open the normal Word and Excel files I have laying around. I'm extremely impressed.
Maybe I'm a cynical old man, but all these ArtCraft apps feel a bit too good to be true?
They come out of nowhere (sort of), and they're just a bit long-con trojan horse for some point in the future where the userbase will have to pay the piper.
If these apps eventually have millions of users, most of whom will just be downloading the binary releases and using auto-update to get the latest version through some opaque updater, what's to stop a future update from being nefarious?
How does one decide on the layer that each thing lives at architecture wise? Is it just that everything is one layer above whatever subsystems it depends on?
I have seen many claims about clean room implementations. I've seen the numerous refutations of reverse engineering binaries. I want to believe. But the pace is too coincidental imo. I know someone from Storycraft has been defending this in each thread and has acknowledged the lawsuit issue on other projects, but still, I'm hesitantly curious about patent violation considerations. Feel like I'm missing something here.
I don't get why this is so impressive? You have libreoffice as well, but this project, like that one, will find that maintenance and resolving user issues and providing cloud features are the hardest and most valuable parts of document editing software. Not just having something that works like other open source document editors that already exist.
Also look through the issues page and you see issues like spell check doesn't work and image embedding doesn't work.
So were just done with the original definition of "clean-room implementation" right?
Cause you cant use AI that you cant guarantee wasnt trained on this implementation, and call it a clean-room implementation. At least not if you are going to be honest, but I guess that makes sense given how much these AI companies and their leaders lie.
I think the idea here is that all these reverse-engineering projects are _saying_ they're doing clean room implementations for quasi-legal protection.
So they are claiming to follow the legally protected "decompile -> write spec -> new code from spec only" process but they're likely skipping the "write spec" step, and hoping/assuming that it's basically impossible to prove that they're doing so.
I do wonder if some company with money to burn and their backs against the wall will find a sympathetic judge in the argument that precedent be damned, clean-room implementations made with AI cannot be considered clean-room. It's too little too late to stop the rapid advancement of open tech, but that hasn't stopped courts from trying to send a message.
If these models will happily recite AGPL 3.0 code as “clean room implementations”, I’m glad that they will also help hobbyists experiment with software. Seems like a fair trade
I don’t know about office, but there have been several major leaks of the Windows source code. It seems pretty reasonable to think that that leaked code has made it into Claude or Codex in some form.
Can you tell me what the definition of "clean-room implementation" is?
And after that, can you tell me if you can call something a "clean-room implantation" without disclosing 100% of the training data used for the AI model making this supposedly "clean-room implementation"?
How did those mathematician's data probably wind up in OpenAI's training data? They are willing to rip off Disney (one of the most litigious IP companies on the planet). There's no reason they wouldn't be willing to rip off the MS Word files uploaded by MS devs (and even less reason they won't steal your work too).
I really think the AI companies think there's no turning back on the infringement and they have to infringe in a "too big to fail" manner to the point where they can force an exception for AI not caring about the fallout for IP rights.
I can't speak for anyone else, but the reason I did the MS Office on Linux thing was because there is a subset of people who want the proper noun Microsoft Office and will use that as an excuse to not move to Linux. My parents, for example.
I don't really use MS Office for anything but Excel since I don't really do WYSIWYG document editing and even if I did I probably would use LibreOffice or OnlyOffice or something. LibreOffice Calc just kind of sucks as of right now.
It is extremely far from a working solution for someone who uses these apps for just casual non-professional use. For professional use, I borrow Wolfgang Pauli's "not even wrong" to say it is not even something to think of. People who think this is a possible replacement just don't have a clue about how big a software like Photoshop and MS Word are, and how much they actually provide their users with.
I know that "Hey I open-source'd Adobe and Microsoft" can get people some hype on TikTok and Twitter, and maybe have some media reporting about them for fun, but I am really surprised that people here are passing on these like they are really what they claim to be. Genuinely, if anything can be used as a counterargument for the promised LLMs revolution, it would be software like this.
The only catch will be if attention coalesces around an individual project instead of hundreds of people vibecoding their own versions.
Their websites look more polished than the apps themselves, have download options for non-technical users, and in no place that I can see (as of writing) do they mention that they are early development: https://getartcraft.com/apps/wordcraft
In "the before times" it was at least the norm to place at the top of a github repo and download section "this is early alpha" or similar to not let down potential users. This project currently seems like a great way to burn user willingness to try new apps.
While Bun proved at-scale rewrite, these are proving huge at-scale re-dos of the entire software ecosystem.
I suspect 24 months from now the landscape of daily software is going to be vastly changed.
I'm curious about this part. As a user you're finding them extremely buggy - what kind of bugs are you seeing?
It sounds like you're expecting the bugs to be ironed out in six months. I guess I'm wondering if the same process that led to buggy software in the first place can actually be used to get rid of the bugs without creating more.
With a human in the loop, iterating on bugfixes can work. It’s just more human-labor-intensive than an initial implementation.
I suppose you could invite users to submit bug reports, give them some guidelines on how to write them, and then have an LLM monitor the bug reports and fix them. But then I think you’d be more likely to see the creation of more bugs, as you say.
Like so many open source GUI projects, it's clear they have solid technical developers who are building good underlying tech, but they have no one on the project doing any kind of user research or spending time thinking about what good UI/UX looks like.
Not so sure about that one
This is software's radiology moment.
Of course, the quality of this is nowhere near good enough, but in theory :)
I'm not entirely sure they will, though.
Types help: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49806799
Agent memory helps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49948328
Storytold's projects include some: https://github.com/storytold/photocraft/blob/main/AGENTS.md
More?
as for skills, did similar research 3 months ago, and couldn’t find anything comprehensive …
except this link https://github.com/leonardomso/rust-skills/tree/master/rules
ended up asking claude for code review 3 time and logging best practices in markdown gives compound effect
as a heavy temporal.io user i was never really bothered with async tokio rust gotchas
https://github.com/temporalio/sdk-rust
python libs written in rust under hood is a good source of rustish domain specific best practices too … if you are ok to see lot of “unsafe” code and clever tricks
A Word clone would have to offer something which Google Docs doesn't which is also what users want.
What a time to be alive.
They come out of nowhere (sort of), and they're just a bit long-con trojan horse for some point in the future where the userbase will have to pay the piper.
I hope I'm wrong!
If these apps eventually have millions of users, most of whom will just be downloading the binary releases and using auto-update to get the latest version through some opaque updater, what's to stop a future update from being nefarious?
Also look through the issues page and you see issues like spell check doesn't work and image embedding doesn't work.
Cause you cant use AI that you cant guarantee wasnt trained on this implementation, and call it a clean-room implementation. At least not if you are going to be honest, but I guess that makes sense given how much these AI companies and their leaders lie.
So they are claiming to follow the legally protected "decompile -> write spec -> new code from spec only" process but they're likely skipping the "write spec" step, and hoping/assuming that it's basically impossible to prove that they're doing so.
That would quickly fall apart in a courtroom, when they can’t produce the spec or show any evidence of development being done from the spec.
In any case, with LLMs I don’t see why that step would need to be skipped.
And after that, can you tell me if you can call something a "clean-room implantation" without disclosing 100% of the training data used for the AI model making this supposedly "clean-room implementation"?
I really think the AI companies think there's no turning back on the infringement and they have to infringe in a "too big to fail" manner to the point where they can force an exception for AI not caring about the fallout for IP rights.
These Artcraft apps seem to work on Linux completely fine, at least with the bit I've played with.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746401
I don't really use MS Office for anything but Excel since I don't really do WYSIWYG document editing and even if I did I probably would use LibreOffice or OnlyOffice or something. LibreOffice Calc just kind of sucks as of right now.
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should."