Rust upstart reveals 'reimplementation' of Microsoft Office – with Claude on coding duty

ArtCraft has added alternatives to Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to its growing collection of Rust applications, which it describes as "clean-room reimplementations" of proprietary software. The projects lean heavily on Claude for development and remain unfinished, but our first look at its Word alternative, WordCraft, suggests they are worth watching. The company's GitHub repositories also include projects modeled on Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere Pro. We fired up WordCraft on an Arm-based Surface and it worked pretty well. WordCraft resembles Microsoft's application, although its buttons, icons, and other imagery differ. "The spelling dictionary and hyphenation come from Grady Ward's public-domain Moby Hyphenator II word list," ArtCraft says, and the application is dual-licensed under MIT or Apache 2.0. The company is at pains to point out that WordCraft is at the pre-alpha stage and estimates that it is at 62 percent of real feature parity, although "an alpha for everyday writing is close." …