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Interesting feature, but I'm afraid of using it on Excel. It's so easy to mess up on Excel, there are no crystal clear diffs like on Git. And even if that on G

Interesting feature, but I'm afraid of using it on Excel. It's so easy to mess up on Excel, there are no crystal clear diffs like on Git. And even if that on Git we make mistakes. Very often you have data that affects other data etc. Also, we have DBs and other resources (even MS Access...) because we know how error-prone are Excel sheets. If using AI adds another layer of potential problems with my Excel sheets, I'm not sure how using it would improve my overall work. I believe they'd need to change the Excel quite a lot in order to make using AI 'excel'. Maybe the new Excel is a new Excel-esque application with a new layer of tools to enable it to work properly with AI. Like something that allows you to validate against a set of values described by prompt etc. There are so many possibilities now with LLMs and I feel those integrations are very shallow, more of the same thing. I don't need a Clippy on steroids. I want a new experience.

graypegg 1y ago
Some 3D CAD programs (FreeCAD, Fusion 360, others I assume) have this sort of confusing tree view for history+dependencies+state all-in-one. Since the face of one feature could be the origin of another feature, you need to have a pretty rigid order of operations that's fully explorable. The tree-view works great but UI wise for average folk, it's a cryptic use of that tree-view pattern. There is SOMETHING there though, I think if you could show the flow of data in the same space as the data itself, you'd have a worthy Excel-like thing that does well with an AI agent jumping in to either fix something or attempt to irreparably break everything. Rather than looking at a diff grid of cells with hidden expressions, or a spaghetti mess of nodes with lines, I think a structured and shallow-nested tree would be easier to understand... maybe. Rather than expressions, you'd have features like in CAD that act on some base table, and you could jump back to the table as it was at a state where that feature was applied, make a tweak, and jump forward again. Eg. Adding an item-specific tax calculation is a single operation in between the items + sum feature, rather than two operations where I have to hook up items => itemsWithTaxes, then tweak sum to read from each itemsWithTaxes. If I'm ever confused about what sum is doing while setting this up, I can go "back" in time to the state the sum feature works on, and I only see the data it has to work with.

graypegg 1y ago

Some 3D CAD programs (FreeCAD, Fusion 360, others I assume) have this sort of confusing tree view for history+dependencies+state all-in-one. Since the face of one feature could be the origin of another feature, you need to have a pretty rigid order of operations that's fully explorable. The tree-view works great but UI wise for average folk, it's a cryptic use of that tree-view pattern. There is SOMETHING there though, I think if you could show the flow of data in the same space as the data itself, you'd have a worthy Excel-like thing that does well with an AI agent jumping in to either fix something or attempt to irreparably break everything. Rather than looking at a diff grid of cells with hidden expressions, or a spaghetti mess of nodes with lines, I think a structured and shallow-nested tree would be easier to understand... maybe. Rather than expressions, you'd have features like in CAD that act on some base table, and you could jump back to the table as it was at a state where that feature was applied, make a tweak, and jump forward again. Eg. Adding an item-specific tax calculation is a single operation in between the items + sum feature, rather than two operations where I have to hook up items => itemsWithTaxes, then tweak sum to read from each itemsWithTaxes. If I'm ever confused about what sum is doing while setting this up, I can go "back" in time to the state the sum feature works on, and I only see the data it has to work with.