The clones are coming home

There is something extremely funny about watching people use AI to rebuild the software they are tired of renting. The promise was that these models would make other people’s expensive expertise available on demand. Writing, illustration, programming: describe what you want and the machine will produce something resembling it. Now people are asking for the applications too. Photoshop. Illustrator. Word. Excel. On my own computer, with the source code, please. Brandon Thomas’s Crafting Apps, from ArtCraft, use Claude to attempt just that. The Rust recreations of Adobe’s creative tools have been joined by WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft, targeting Microsoft Office. They have native desktop builds, familiar interfaces and public repositories. I love the ambition. The announcements of Adobe’s demise can wait. PhotoCraft’s 11 October roadmap reports all 628 menu items wired up, while estimating readiness for real work at about 45%. WordCraft’s own assessment lists charts, SmartArt and…