Comment by lr0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lr0 | Hacker News Reader

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 labeling it a 'reimplementation'. The quality of the software is just very embarrassing to anyone who might have used any of the originals, or at least can assess basic software qualities. I have tried some of them and really everything is buggy, a lot of options and buttons make the whole thing crash, the UX is very poor compared to the originals. I tried some of the clones of Adobe's apps, and they just don't work. I tried wordcraft as of writing this, it does not work and it is even more buggy than my experience with 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.

It is extremely far from a working solution for someone who uses these apps for just casual non-professional use. For professional use, I borrow Wolfgang Pauli's "not even wrong" to say it is not even something to think of. People who think this is a possible replacement just don't have a clue about how big a software like Photoshop and MS Word are, and how much they actually provide their users with.

I know that "Hey I open-source'd Adobe and Microsoft" can get people some hype on TikTok and Twitter, and maybe have some media reporting about them for fun, but I am really surprised that people here are passing on these like they are really what they claim to be. Genuinely, if anything can be used as a counterargument for the promised LLMs revolution, it would be software like this.

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.

So AI has made everyone managers. Got it.

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.

This problem predates AI by decades.

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.

But this is not even the easy 80%. More like a skin-deep “reimplementation”.

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.

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.

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. Works very well for wordcraft and deckcraft.

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.

What's the advantage over mature open source products like LibreOffice?

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.

Call out: Is pdfCraft better than this site:

https://www.ilovepdf.com/

Esp. in terms of quality regarding document output

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.

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?)

People who don't put in effort to build a thing also don't put in effort to test a thing. The effort creates investment.

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.

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