A Rust project is reimplementing Microsoft Office with Claude doing the coding
Richard Speed at The Register reports on ArtCraft, a company that has added Word, Excel and PowerPoint alternatives to its collection of Rust applications. It calls them clean-room reimplementations of proprietary software, and the projects lean heavily on Claude for development. Its GitHub repositories also include projects modeled on Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere Pro.
The reviewer ran WordCraft, the Word alternative, on an Arm-based Surface and found that it worked well. It resembles Word, though its buttons, icons and imagery differ. It is pre-alpha, ArtCraft estimates 62 percent feature parity with Word, and the reviewer advises against production use. The roadmap admits that DOCX compatibility testing against real-world files has not started, and charts, SmartArt and embedded OLE objects are dropped.
On licensing, WordCraft is dual-licensed under MIT or Apache 2.0, the spelling dictionary and hyphenation use Grady Ward's public-domain Moby Hyphenator II word list, and ArtCraft says everything was built from public specifications and observation with original or openly licensed assets. The Document Foundation, which develops LibreOffice, declined to comment, Microsoft acknowledged the inquiry without a further response, and Adobe declined to comment on the creative-app projects.
Neil Brown of decoded.legal told the paper that the legal position will depend on jurisdiction, and that the developers may argue their independent implementation does not infringe, but a dispute could be litigated given the stakes.
What I find interesting is not the claim itself but the speed: a small team using an AI coding tool can now put a recognisable office suite in public, unfinished but usable enough to test. The open questions are quality, maintenance and the legal side. I would love to hear how others who write code with AI assistants think about clean-room claims.
Source: The Register
The reviewer ran WordCraft, the Word alternative, on an Arm-based Surface and found that it worked well. It resembles Word, though its buttons, icons and imagery differ. It is pre-alpha, ArtCraft estimates 62 percent feature parity with Word, and the reviewer advises against production use. The roadmap admits that DOCX compatibility testing against real-world files has not started, and charts, SmartArt and embedded OLE objects are dropped.
On licensing, WordCraft is dual-licensed under MIT or Apache 2.0, the spelling dictionary and hyphenation use Grady Ward's public-domain Moby Hyphenator II word list, and ArtCraft says everything was built from public specifications and observation with original or openly licensed assets. The Document Foundation, which develops LibreOffice, declined to comment, Microsoft acknowledged the inquiry without a further response, and Adobe declined to comment on the creative-app projects.
Neil Brown of decoded.legal told the paper that the legal position will depend on jurisdiction, and that the developers may argue their independent implementation does not infringe, but a dispute could be litigated given the stakes.
What I find interesting is not the claim itself but the speed: a small team using an AI coding tool can now put a recognisable office suite in public, unfinished but usable enough to test. The open questions are quality, maintenance and the legal side. I would love to hear how others who write code with AI assistants think about clean-room claims.
Source: The Register
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