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.
Of course, the quality of this is nowhere near good enough, but in theory :)
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.
Not so sure about that one
This is software's radiology moment.
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.
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.
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."
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.