Vibe-coded Office is a magic trick, not a product

The easier it gets to copy Microsoft Office, the safer Microsoft becomes.

That sounds backwards. If anyone with AI can rebuild Word, Excel or Photoshop, the originals should be worth nothing. But look closely at the latest wave of vibe-coded clones and the opposite becomes clear. You can copy the software. You cannot copy the reason people use it.

This October, in the space of two weeks, developer Brandon Thomas used Anthropic’s Claude to release free, open-source clones of Photoshop, Lightroom and Premiere. He then followed with WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft, his versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. They run on Windows, macOS and Linux. WordCraft passed 12,000 stars on GitHub within days, and the internet declared the end of the subscription era.

Now look past the headlines. WordCraft covers about 88% of Word’s ribbon features, and GridCraft handles 513 of Excel’s 523 worksheet functions. Impressive, until you read the team’s own assessment: WordCraft is roughly 60% of the way to replacing Word for real work, and GridCraft is “about 50% ready”. Real-world .xlsx compatibility is still on GridCraft’s to-do list.

That gap is the whole story. Nobody pays for Excel because it has 523 functions. They pay because the spreadsheet the finance team sends on Monday opens exactly as it was built. Features are easy to copy. Compatibility, reliability and trust are not.

The Adobe clones have the same problem. PhotoWorkout reports that the Photoshop clone is still in “early alpha” and that none of the clones import a Lightroom catalogue cleanly. Adobe’s real lock-in was never the toolbar. It was always years of edits, keywords and workflows that a clone cannot carry over.

Then there is the question nobody asks at launch: who will maintain this in two years? Veracode tested more than 100 AI models and found that 45% of the code samples they produced failed standard security tests. CodeRabbit found that AI co-written code carried up to 2.74 times more security issues than code written by people alone. An office suite opens files from strangers every day, which is exactly where a security hole hurts most.

And free alternatives already exist. LibreOffice has been around for more than a decade, and Google Docs costs nothing. If price were all that mattered, people would have left Microsoft long ago.

Notice how every clone describes itself: 88% of Word, 513 of Excel’s functions. The original is the measuring stick. Every new copy is one more product checking itself against Microsoft and Adobe, and one more reason to trust the real thing when the work matters.

So vibe-code all you like. Building software is now cheap. But building was never the expensive part. Earning a decade of trust is. Would you bet your most important file on a clone, in front of your biggest client?

Sources

• Yahoo Tech: Developer who cloned Photoshop with AI just did the same to Microsoft Office (opens in a new tab)
• TechSpot: The developer who cloned Photoshop using AI has now created Word, Excel and PowerPoint replicas (opens in a new tab)
• PhotoWorkout: Someone vibe-coded free Photoshop and Lightroom clones (opens in a new tab)
• PetaPixel: Someone rebuilt free, open-source versions of Photoshop, Premiere and Lightroom using AI (opens in a new tab)
• Cloud Security Alliance: Vibe coding security debt (summarises the Veracode findings) (opens in a new tab)
• CodeRabbit: State of AI vs human code generation report (opens in a new tab)