The news about Adobe’s Creative Suite being clean-room rewritten in Rust got me thinking in the middle of the night.

I fired up Claude Code on my phone and had it create a clean-room implementation of TK!Solver, based on the classic Mac version from 1984–85. My main requirement was that it run entirely in the browser.

This is what it came up with. I did have to point it toward the Chicago and Monaco fonts to get the look right. I also gave it a YouTube video demonstrating how TK!Solver works, along with a couple of other reference URLs.

GitHub project:
https://github.com/holla2040/MKSolver

Run it directly in your browser:
https://holla2040.github.io/MKSolver/dist/MKSolver.html

I still use my original Mac version from 1985, running under a Mac Plus emulator on Linux. TK!Solver has been a workhorse in my engineering work for more than 40 years.

Why is it this important to anyone? We are about to enter a new phase of computer interaction as a society. Clean room implementations of pre-existing software signal the end of intellectual property. This fosters an environment where non-technical people can create computer solutions that directly match their needs and desires, rather than being forced into using canned solutions that are "easy to use" - FO Microsoft and your impossible "easy to use" versions of Word and Excel.

This week I watched my wife, who has never written any kind of computer software, HTML code or anything like it, create a custom app for her daily food intake balance of fat, protein, and carbs. She was frustrated with the free phone app that was littering the experience with advertising. I set her up with ChatGPT Desktop configured to modify her personal website. After a few hours of work she basically duplicated the Android phone app as a mobile html version.