The Crafting Apps · read 18 October 2026
One team cloned Office in a week. Their own roadmap says it's 60% done.
WordCraft, GridCraft, DeckCraft and CADCraft are clean-room, Apache-licensed rewrites of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and AutoCAD. They were built with Claude, released on 7 October, and hold 29,271 stars between them.
Every outlet covered the claim. Almost none read the thing that makes these projects unusual: each one publishes a parity audit against the software it replaces, with a percentage, a stage, and an estimate of the hours left.
None of the four is ready to replace the app it clones.
But
All four are further along than their coverage suggests — and far more honest about the gap.
The ledger
Four clones, one scoreboard.
Every figure below is either from the GitHub API on 18 October 2026, or a self-estimate the project publishes in its own ROADMAP.md. Self-estimates are labelled as such, because a project grading its own homework is not the same as a test result.
| App | Clones | Stage | Breadth (weighted) | Ready for real work | Stars | Open issues |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| WordCraft Word processor | Word 16.113.4 | alpha | ~80% | ~60% | 14,199 | 1,344 |
| GridCraft Spreadsheet | Excel 365 | alpha | ~75% | ~50% | 5,668 | 1,113 |
| DeckCraft Presentations | PowerPoint 16.113 | alpha | 84% | ~55% | 3,735 | 394 |
| CADCraft 2D drafting | AutoCAD 2027 | pre-alpha | 50% | ~38% | 5,669 | 711 |
| SolidCraft Parametric 3D CAD | Not a clone | v0.15 | 75/76 | Early | 4,707 | 840 |
The gap
Breadth is 80–84%. Depth is 38–60%.
This is the whole story of the Crafting Apps, in one chart. Breadth counts features that exist — menus, commands, buttons. Depth asks whether those features survive a real document. The four projects measure both, and publish both.
The 20–36 point gap between the two bars is where these apps actually live. A menu that opens is not a feature that works on the file your client sent you. Each project's own docs/gaps.md lists what is missing; we summarise them on the individual pages.
What 60% buys
Three things worth knowing before you download one.
It is not a mock-up
The screenshots in these repositories are rendered by the projects' own UI test harnesses, not mocked up. The installers are code-signed. The issue trackers have four-figure counts because thousands of people ran the binaries and filed what broke.
The file is the weak point
Every one of the four names file fidelity as its biggest remaining cost. CADCraft's README says the quiet part out loud: entities it does not model "are not kept on save." Opening a document is not the same as being able to save it back without loss.
The agents are the point
All four ship an MCP server and a scriptable command line before they ship a finished product. These are built to be driven by an AI agent as much as by a person — which is a different bet from "a cheaper Word."
Read each one
The five, individually.
WordCraft
The most complete of the four, and the only one that claims a round-trip your colleagues can open.
GridCraft
513 of Excel's 523 worksheet functions — but the project still calls itself 50% ready.
DeckCraft
Morph transitions and presenter view in a two-week-old Rust app. The deck is the easy part; the export is not.
CADCraft
The ambitious one. AutoLISP, 3D and DWG write fidelity are listed as years of agent-hours, not sprints.
SolidCraft
A different team, a different approach: fewer features, far more proof. The one that behaves like finished software.
What they look like
The windows, not the mock-ups.
Every image below comes from the project’s own repository. None of it is a concept render, and none of it was supplied by a PR department.
Comparisons