Storytold apps are a gift, and are setting the precedent for AI apps. Everyone was wondering about the relevance of open source in post AI era, and here we have it: a magnitude more ambitious ecosystem.
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.
We already have one entire software ecosystem, why do we need another?
Is there any evidence that LLM development practices result in code that is more reliable or easier to maintain?
And is software truly open source if the preferred way to maintain it is via proprietary commercial services whose behavior is subject to frequent change without notice?
So were just done with the original definition of "clean-room implementation" right?
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.
If these models will happily recite AGPL 3.0 code as “clean room implementations”, I’m glad that they will also help hobbyists experiment with software. Seems like a fair trade
These apps are awesome, but they make me a little nervous. I can just imagine when a "clean room Rust" Oracle DB (re)implementation hits GitHub that Oracle would not just sit there and take it but would instead rain lawyers down from the sky... Ditto for other companies that have hornet's nest legal departments.
In the context of Orcale and the like, I have a feeling sales would present bigger obstacles than legal.
Jokes about training an LLM to golf with executives aside, how do you establish credibility for a vibe-coded reimplementation of Oracle sufficient to convince even one major Oracle customer to bet their business on it, at any price?
I don't get why this is so impressive? You have libreoffice as well, but this project, like that one, will find that maintenance and resolving user issues and providing cloud features are the hardest and most valuable parts of document editing software. Not just having something that works like other open source document editors that already exist.
Also look through the issues page and you see issues like spell check doesn't work and image embedding doesn't work.
Maybe I'm a cynical old man, but all these ArtCraft apps feel a bit too good to be true?
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.
How does one decide on the layer that each thing lives at architecture wise? Is it just that everything is one layer above whatever subsystems it depends on?
Has anyone of the people spamming these apps by storytold on HN actually tried any of them? I know that any new software can have bugs, but the ones here are really not acceptable for a release, let alone naming it a 'reimplementation'. The quality of the software is just very embarrassing to anyone using any of the original apps, everything is buggy, a lot of buttons make the whole thing crash, the UX is very poor compared to the originals. I tried some of the Adobe's apps, and they just don't work. I tried wordcraft as I am writing this, it does not work and it is even more buggy that photocraft, changing a text to a headline made it just crash on my M4 MacBook, after making it VERY slow and unresponsive for 3 minutes.
I know that "Hey I open-source'd Adobe and Apple' can get people some hype on TikTok and Twitter, and maybe have some media reporting about them for fun. But genuinely, if anything can be used as a counterargument for the promised LLMs revolution, it would be software like this.
I see what you're saying, but we're just getting to the start of it being worthwhile to do something like this. Once these projects have people testing them and proposing changes/improvements (AI driven), I don't think it would be long until they are on par with, if not better than the originals.
The only catch will be if attention coalesces around an individual project instead of hundreds of people vibecoding their own versions.
That's fine, but why not make it clearer that they're extremely early alpha?
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.
“I don’t think it would be long” is an age-old planning fallacy in this field, AI hasn’t changed that. It is certainly easy to clone a UI today because an agent has a target to iterate against, but cloning all the behaviours of the software in question is going to prove to be much more difficult.
These are decades-old software where even the inconsistencies, quirks and bugs are now considered features (because users have come to rely upon them) - a full detailed specification itself would be very complicated. My bet is this OSS-clone hype will last all of 6 months.
Codebase of the behemoths should be around in the GB-range, Millions of engineering hours and QA etc.; I do not see how one person even with 100 agents will be able to coordinate/navigate such a large project.
My bet is: This guy is pumping out that stuff to land a good job somewhere :-)
(I doubt that by now someone is paying for the continuously crashing clones?)
Like everything in this stupid, hype-driven AI industry, it's always the "easy" 80% that is done; the actually-difficult final 20% is always waved off with vague future promises.
My personal hell at work is my PM vibe coding some prototype, showing it to my director or vp to get them excited, and then coming to me to say that it is basically done so I should be able to deliver in a couple weeks.
yeah, but before they had to make their hands dirty to deliver at least something >made by them<, even if its some basic mockups on some slides to show an idea
now, they open discussions with "you cant imagine how many tokens I burnt yesterday to create X" and then showing a widget with 5 buttons that runs within Claude/Browser without any real data or connection to the rest of any parts of the company :-D
Never before has my PM been able to make a prototype in a day or two.
Yes, it was always possible for a PM to get a VP excited about a project and then lead to some mandate. But at least then I got to do a time estimate and they believed me. Today they can create a prototype to show to the VP so that both of them conclude that the project isn't actually very hard and my estimate of two engineers and four months gets rejected because "the prototype is 80% of the way there and it only took two days" even though the prototype is running locally on my PM's machine and is using fake data when we don't have easy access to the real data.
These apps have to be astroturfed, right? Like I get the desire to give Microsoft and Adobe the middle finger and I guess it's somewhat impressive these apps even do anything, but man are they such buggy pieces of trash. Like you said, I downloaded the Word clone and it's broken in so many ways that I can't even describe what the bugs are. In 5 minutes of messing around, I hit so many random and inconsistent failures of basic functionality like styles, image resizing, and table formatting. Plus the UI is atrocious. All the downsides of Windows apps mixed with all the downsides of a weird cross-platform UI framework.
Agreed, every behavior of this particular dev supports the hypothesis that they are producing mass slop to a "good enough" level to receive massive hype, without the intention to put in the thousands of GPU-hours it would require to polish (actually, the estimated roadmap is growing rapidly in expected timeframe as the AI understands the difficulty of the task). I expect there to be more and more of these crappy surface-level implementations before people lose interest and the dev drops all of it.
Yes. The word one is excellent for doing what I keep using Google Docs for. Just get a nice document going -> print -> pdf. Very easy.
And the pdfCraft is so much better than every pdf site on the internet.
Also Gridcraft at least equals Google Sheets for me in functionality. Too bad copy paste from Excel or Google Sheets doesn't work correctly. It does work, which is already impressive.
This is probably not heavy use, I get it, but definitely improves things for me. Also rapid improvements are incoming.
This works at least as well on the web as Google docs. Obviously that's without the collaboration features, as well as using your local filesystem instead of Google Drive/Azure Cloud storage.
But Google Drive was always the worst part of Google Docs by far (imho).
And collaboration ... for my personal office needs ... I sometimes try to do this with my wife and kids, but almost never.
Pdfcraft is far superior to all those stupid pdf sites, and Wordcraft easily does what I use Google Docs for.
For Word-to-PDF specifically, I'd compare them with an Indian-language document, merged table cells and pictures. Those were the cases that broke in my own converter when I tried drawing the pages with pdf-lib.
Rendering the .docx with docx-preview and using the browser's print engine preserved those cases in my tests. The cost was an extra click in the print dialog. That doesn't establish how pdfCraft compares with iLovePDF, but I'd want those documents in any output-quality comparison.
Photocraft is near parity for day to day use. I stopped using gimp and photopea and completely migrate to photocraft. Granted I am not poweruser with tons of plugins. Simple editing and layering, masks, transparency, gif-jpg-png concersions are very doable with this. So yes, it is good enough for production use for majority of not-so-poweruser.
Just create a blueprint with specs and architecture decisions, software cycle, with product and research docs, plus other needed docs like legal or such, and always use it to make the code. Don’t use memory because the way it gets called by the model isn’t good, and for any updates make the model update the specs too. That’s what I do and the output not just consistent but also future proof for updates or revisions or audits.
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
Why make a clone when you can redo the whole dang UI? Sure we'd like WYSIWYG, but I am absolutely convinced now in my 34th year of computer user that I don't want a GUI with a bunch of toolbars and dropdown menus.
This reminds me of the shareware clones of popular PC software sold for $5/floppy through mail order and mall kiosks that failed to dominate the commercial software industry in the '80s.
While they may be a buggy mess, I think it's really interesting that we're starting to see this unfold in real time. People have been forecasting these kind of changes for the last few years, and it seems like it's actually happening now. Really curious to see where this goes, if everyone has their own custom fork of some common codebase for specific features/needs they have across these base applications.
The entire Excel implementation is under 50 MiB. The Word one is under 90MiB. Insane. I'm sure the features are incomplete, but both can open the normal Word and Excel files I have laying around. I'm extremely impressed.
I have seen many claims about clean room implementations. I've seen the numerous refutations of reverse engineering binaries. I want to believe. But the pace is too coincidental imo. I know someone from Storycraft has been defending this in each thread and has acknowledged the lawsuit issue on other projects, but still, I'm hesitantly curious about patent violation considerations. Feel like I'm missing something here.
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[ 6.6 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadI.e. lawyers, accountants, clerks generally
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.
Not so sure about that one
Is there any evidence that LLM development practices result in code that is more reliable or easier to maintain?
And is software truly open source if the preferred way to maintain it is via proprietary commercial services whose behavior is subject to frequent change without notice?
Is this true for large & mega corps as well with deep enterprise integration? Thats where the money is for most of them.
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.
I'm not entirely sure they will, though.
Good luck.
Jokes about training an LLM to golf with executives aside, how do you establish credibility for a vibe-coded reimplementation of Oracle sufficient to convince even one major Oracle customer to bet their business on it, at any price?
Also look through the issues page and you see issues like spell check doesn't work and image embedding doesn't work.
I prefer to not have those in my text editor
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!
I know that "Hey I open-source'd Adobe and Apple' can get people some hype on TikTok and Twitter, and maybe have some media reporting about them for fun. But 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.
These are decades-old software where even the inconsistencies, quirks and bugs are now considered features (because users have come to rely upon them) - a full detailed specification itself would be very complicated. My bet is this OSS-clone hype will last all of 6 months.
My bet is: This guy is pumping out that stuff to land a good job somewhere :-) (I doubt that by now someone is paying for the continuously crashing clones?)
now, they open discussions with "you cant imagine how many tokens I burnt yesterday to create X" and then showing a widget with 5 buttons that runs within Claude/Browser without any real data or connection to the rest of any parts of the company :-D
Yes, it was always possible for a PM to get a VP excited about a project and then lead to some mandate. But at least then I got to do a time estimate and they believed me. Today they can create a prototype to show to the VP so that both of them conclude that the project isn't actually very hard and my estimate of two engineers and four months gets rejected because "the prototype is 80% of the way there and it only took two days" even though the prototype is running locally on my PM's machine and is using fake data when we don't have easy access to the real data.
And the pdfCraft is so much better than every pdf site on the internet.
Also Gridcraft at least equals Google Sheets for me in functionality. Too bad copy paste from Excel or Google Sheets doesn't work correctly. It does work, which is already impressive.
This is probably not heavy use, I get it, but definitely improves things for me. Also rapid improvements are incoming.
But Google Drive was always the worst part of Google Docs by far (imho).
And collaboration ... for my personal office needs ... I sometimes try to do this with my wife and kids, but almost never.
Pdfcraft is far superior to all those stupid pdf sites, and Wordcraft easily does what I use Google Docs for.
https://www.ilovepdf.com/
Esp. in terms of quality regarding document output
Rendering the .docx with docx-preview and using the browser's print engine preserved those cases in my tests. The cost was an extra click in the print dialog. That doesn't establish how pdfCraft compares with iLovePDF, but I'd want those documents in any output-quality comparison.
Types help: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49806799
Agent memory helps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49948328
Storytold's projects include some best practices: 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.
Because nobody did before they published it. And they don't work.
Some work better then others though, eg my super basic usecases in photocraft mostly worked.