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points by tiahura 16 hours ago | 0 comments

That’s recently changed.

Wordcraft is now a decent Word clone and is leaps and bounds over OpenOffice.

its pre release no one doing real work is going to risk their income on an alpha test

why does it matter for a word doc. At the end of the day, what matters is the doc file you save. that's your artifact. Weather you use a cli tool, agent or ms word to create that file doesn't matter as long as the content is correct and the person who receives the file can open it.

[–] piker 15 hours ago

What's the point of saving $25 bucks or whatever a Word license is to use a vibe coded application?

[–] tiahura 14 hours ago

It's not even $25, it more like $10 / seat.

Because Wordcraft is faster and more stable than Word. Word rarely crashes, but it does freeze. Wordcraft is freezing about 1/2 as often as Word. For the daily grinding out docs, it's way more viable than Openoffice.

But mostly, because having a workflow entirely dependent on a single vendor seems like something to avoid if possible.

The last formatting bug I encountered was last week. Claude identified, patched, and pushed in 10 minutes.

It doesn't do VBA. However, porting VBA to WC macros is trivial for llms.

[–] alansaber 14 hours ago

25 bucks is 25 bucks. I also feel that losing your license because you tried to save 25 bucks on MS Word seems unlikely (not legal advice).

[–] lostlogin 12 hours ago

Is the cost of Word anywhere on anyone’s hate list?

[–] alansaber 12 hours ago

Massive amounts of people hate the SAAS model and frequent end of support for older perpetual versions.

[–] thatsallchildsp 14 hours ago

Why become hostage to a multibillion conglomerate for "editing text"? It's asinine what people are using Word for. If engineering types need special syntax handling I get it, but lawyers.. accountants.. my god man, plain text is fine with some semi-fancy markup a la markdown renderers these days. Some tables, some red lines, some fonts.. It's trivial. It was not in the 80s but it is now.

[–] dghlsakjg 14 hours ago

I haven’t used many of these vibe coded clones, but the ones I have used have all been significantly lacking in depth compared to what they are ripping off. I’m sure wordcraft works fine for typing a high school 5 paragraph essay (although, I don’t think high school students still do that). I would be shocked if it can handle revision history, complex redline edits, legal brief formatting, etc.

[–] tiahura 14 hours ago

It handles complex redlines, legal brief formatting, etc.

When you convert to pdf, it typically produces identical content streams to Word.

[–] dghlsakjg 13 hours ago

I just tried it out of curiosity. It doesn't exist in their web suite, when I tried to run it using their launcher it failed to install and crashed the installer.

I can't directly refute your claims, but I can say that a program that won't install can't do any of those things for me.

I don't care if my lawyer doesn't use word. I do care if they use a buggy, vibe coded that is still in Alpha. Word processing is a solved problem. Free (beer or speech) word processing is a solved problem. Word compatible free word processing is a solved problem. Don't put my case in jeopardy because you want to use untested, alpha software.

[–] tiahura 9 hours ago

Hard to diag from here. use claude code to launch and diag.

[–] thatsallchildsp 14 hours ago

All your points are laughably trivial features. We don't "Word" for that bullshit.

[–] dghlsakjg 13 hours ago

Which parts of your bullshit do you use word for?