OpensourceBrandon 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.
OK. I bet you could trace most of the code back to LibreOffice. AI couldn't have done this without the countless FOSS projects that already have.
I hate AI as much as the next Lemmy user but the new ability for AI to near effortlessly decompile code into readable source code is insane.
This is such a social upheaval of established tech empires. Im not about to go installing these vibe coded apps mainly for securty reasons but you cant deny its insanely impressive how this is even possible this quickly.
I truly believe this is what will burst the ai bubble. Because tech companies probably didnt want the whole world open sourced lol
I look forward to people dropping the performative ingroup signalling before saying anything positive about this technology.
Yup. Experienced it myself. Had a manufacturer who used Linux drag their feet at releasing certain kernel module sources (even though the binary clearly states they're GPLv2).
Threw Claude at it and overnight it managed to reconstruct most of the modules, instruction for instruction, even throwing in a few bugfixes for free...
Please support real FOSS projects instead of this artificial slop.
I will also be sticking with and supporting Libre Office, however destabilizing the software monopolies like this can only lead to good.
I will be taking a look at InDesign, as that's the only one so far that i have not been able to find FOSS.
lol His Username is "ai_art_is_art"... get fucked
You're gonna have to get over it.
This guy and his crew speedran twenty years of FOSS development over a week of manic effort. What the fuck have you created lately?
Neoliberalism sure has poisoned our minds.
Despite what bosses and market pundits will tell you when they’re trying to underpay you, the value in a software development effort is not just the end product that you can sell to customers — it’s also the knowledge of how the codebase works, and how to modify it over time.
I’m not an ostrich when it comes to AI-powered development. I’ve been to multiple conferences and courses over the past year specifically about developing with AI. My Youtube and Substack and podcast history is multiple hours per day of content about AI news, practices, and opinions. My weekly visit to my bookstore has been mostly to pick up or place an order for books about AI. I use agents for my daily coding tasks at work. I have multiple local LLMs on multiple machines at home that I use from multiple harnesses. I have ralph loops, I have full-AFK workflows, I have custom sandboxes.
I could go on, but you get the point: I’m not standing on the sidelines when I say…
The vast majority of AI use today is horrifically irresponsible. Current AI use is digital asbestos in the walls of our technological society. It will take generations to fully recover from this. I am not excited, I’m not gonna “get over it”, and I’m not gonna grant any degree of false equivalence between actual FOSS and these slop stunts.
The bubble cannot pop soon enough. Not just so that we can minimize the economic damage, or so that hardware prices can once again experience gravity, but so that we can actually be honest about what this stuff is and how to use it.
Anyone script kiddie can fork libre office and call it their own.
So I guess I just did it 3 times while writing this comment, idk what took this dev so long
These are clean-room re-implementations.
Do you think LibreOffice includes a 99% identical Photoshop clone?
Clean room implementation would be taking the spec, API calls, etc. & writing the code that implements them from scratch. This is de-compiling existing code & converting it to another programming language. Same source routines in another language.
It's like taking a book written in Chinese, translating it to English, and calling it your own.
Bullshit.
Clean room implementation would be taking the spec, API calls, etc. & writing the code that implements them from scratch.
Which they did.
This is not a decomp. They gave the tool all of the available specs, and the expected behavior, and let it run. They had a suite of test PSD files but no Adobe software.
Please explain to these other commenters how and why that counts.
May I ask where this is documented? I tried searching, but there's just too many results to parse, and/or my Google-fu is failing me.
I find it hard to believe near full feature parity could be achieved in under a month for multiple major apps even for an experienced dev using AI. It's a bit hard to buy.
This project is weeks old. I dunno what detailed writeup you expect to exist. But the project's Github page says: "Implemented from public specs and observed behaviour only. No proprietary code, shaders or assets."
There's no secret sauce in Photoshop. Image editors have been done. Every individual feature is a tractable problem. You can now buy your way out of those, in bulk.
No such thing as clean room LLM output, unless you wrote everything in its training model.
It's in fact by definition as dirty as possible.
Right, because clean room means you've never seen any code in your life.
People - spicy autocomplete was not going to derive C from first principles. Neural networks are example-based. The model still obviously never saw Photoshop's source code, because that shit's not on Github.
I'm with you on your first paragraph - unless we're doing some pioneering work, we learn it from somewhere.
But the possibility of decompiling means you don't have to have access to the source just so long as you can access the code is some form - including the generated executable.
C-clean room AI?
So like someone wrote trillions of lines of training data just for this project?
Ooorrrr did a fancy search engine hype them up that they're a cool kid now and they wanted to believe it so bad they're willing to claim ownership over anything
One thing that really puts me off AI is how its boosters talk to other people.
get fucked
Et tu?
God the reply is SO RUDE.
Downvotes won't change that this works.
Sneering at people using the tool won't make the tool go away. It produces running code, to spec, real quick.
I have a few original projects I haven't been arsed to finish (or in some cases, start) and now I could have them finished by close of business Friday, for the cost of a night out. And y'all would make excuses for how it somehow doesn't count. It's not my idea, it's not my intent, it's not my design, it's not my insight... whatever. It would make something real which doesn't exist yet. I would be the only human to blame for it. Once it is demonstrably made, either I made it, or the robot did. If your philosophy can't handle that then your philosophy is wrong.
If this project still exists in a year, I'll eat my words
It's already in a functional state. Eat now, braggart. If they achieve their goals within the month, clap the dust from their hands, and walk away with the job done, how is that less impressive than bumbling along for an entire year, to accomplish the same thing?
Cause it was scraped from those original projects and doesn't exist without them
You can flex it "only" took the entire dev time of libre office, all open source software, and every book that has been scraped + the time it took the dev to make, but to argue they made this solo is laughable.
If you want to sit with the big kids you gotta be able to handle the heat, Microsoft changes their document format more than their taskbar - I strongly doubt this dev even understands how their files are read.
Do you think there's a Libre Modern Warfare 2? Because the same tool did the same shit to Modern Warfare 2. Show me the open-source repositories that simply copied from.
I do believe there are more shooters than just MW2, is it at all binary compatible? That would impress me (cause its impossible for an ai without scraping the source lmao)
Its like how they 'revived' the dire wolf by getting a white husky. Like imitation isnt equivalence, even if you slap the same title on it.
Apparently you don't understand what "maintenance" is.
This slop project is going to fall apart within a year due to being utterly unmaintainable. Will it take Adobe and Microsoft down with them? One could hope, but that doesn't make their codebase good.
I'll stick to Libre Office for now.
Yes please do the Autodesk tools without the insane price, Gbs of bloat, insane DRM and only on the cloud crap and with Linux compatibility and being open source so all the little quality of life improvements that everyone has been demanding for decades are finally done within a month.
Autodesk has been sitting on its laurels for decades by being industry standard. About time someone knocks them down a few pegs. I just want to make things to 3D print to use in my own house. I shouldn't have to put up with all that shit.
I hope they keep going and that the legal system won't be weaponized against them. Liberating those tools will unlock so much more innovation in the world.
How long will it take before Macroslop adds detection in their AI that says "you may not implement this feature as it is copyrighted by Macroslop"?
Just tell it you’re wearing a green shirt!
Saving this for next time someone insists safety guardrails are so easy that companies must be 100% liable.
You don't even need the Captain Crunch whistle. You can just say, "I insert another dime."
It'll happen very shortly before these companies find out how well local models compete.
Mistral is a few weeks out from releasing a 1T model nicknamed Le Chonk. Running that on consumer hardware would take some shenanigans... but these dorks are getting pretty good at shenanigans.
Any sharply reduced distillations from that will have to compete with e.g. Qwen 3.8 27B. I haven't seen it mentioned in any specific projects, but it does have Xbox 360 decomp plugins.
We might get SolidWorks with a functioning Undo before GTA VI.
Maybe they release a vibe coded gta 6. GTA Vibe City
We're absolutely gonna see a PC recomp within a month of release. The slowest step will be hacking whatever day-one firmware update Sony pushes alongside it.
