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What is with the negativity in these comments? This is a huge, huge surface area that touches a large percentage of white collar work. Even just basic automatio
by extr 1y ago
What is with the negativity in these comments? This is a huge, huge surface area that touches a large percentage of white collar work. Even just basic automation/scaffolding of spreadsheets would be a big productivity boost for many employees.
My wife works in insurance operations - everyone she manages from the top down lives in Excel. For line employees a large percentage of their job is something like "Look at this internal system, export the data to excel, combine it with some other internal system, do some basic interpretation, verify it, make a recommendation". Computer Use + Excel Use isn't there yet...but these jobs are going to be the first on the chopping block as these integrations mature. No offense to these people but Sonnet 4.5 is already at the level where it would be able to replicate or beat the level of analysis they typically provide.
- cube00 1y agoI don't trust LLMs to do the kind of precise deterministic work you need in a spreadsheet. It's one thing to fudge the language in a report summary, it can be subjective, however numbers are not subjective. It's widely known LLMs are terrible at even basic maths. Even Google's own AI summary admits it which I was surprised at, marketing won't be happy. Yes, it is true that LLMs are often bad at math because they don't "understand" it as a logical system but rather process it as text, relying on pattern recognition from their training data.
- extr 1y agoSeems like you're very confused about what this work typically entails. The job of these employees is not mental arithmatic. It's closer to: - Log in to the internal system that handles customer policies - Find all policies that were bound in the last 30 days - Log in to the internal system that manages customer payments - Verify that for all policies bound, there exists a corresponding payment that roughly matches the premium. - Flag any divergences above X% for accounting/finance to follow up on. Practically this involves munging a few CSVs, maybe typing in a few things, setting up some XLOOKUPs, IF formulas, conditional formatting, etc. Will AI replace the entire job? No...but that's not the goal. Does it have to be perfect? Also no...the existing employees performing this work are also not perfect, and in fact sometimes their accuracy is quite poor.
- Ntrails 1y agoChecking someone elses spreadsheet is a fucking nightmare. If your company has extremely good standards it's less miserable because at least the formatting etc will be consistent... The one thing LLMs should consistently do is ensure that formatting is correct. Which will help greatly in the checking process. But no, I generally don't trust them to do sensible things with basic formulation. Not a week ago GPT 5 got confused whether a plus or a minus was necessary in a basic question of "I'm 323 days old, when is my birthday?"
- szundi 1y ago[dead]
- xmprt 1y agoI think you have a misunderstanding of the types of things that LLMs are good at. Yes you're 100% right that they can't do math. Yet they're quite proficient at basic coding. Most Excel work is similar to basic coding so I think this is an area where they might actually be pretty well suited. My concern would be more with how to check the work (ie, make sure that the formulas are correct and no columns are missed) because Excel hides all that. Unlike code, there's no easy way to generate the diff of a spreadsheet or rely on Git history. But that's different from the concerns that you have.
- collingreen 1y agoI've built spreadsheet diff tools on Google sheets multiple times. As the needs grows I think we will see diffs and commits and review tools reach customers
- break_the_bank 1y agohey Collin! I am working on an AI agent on Google Sheets, I am curious if any of your designs are out in the public. We are trying to re-think how diffs should look like and want to make something nicer than what we currently have, so curious.
- mrcwinn 1y agoI couldn’t agree more. I get all my perfectly deterministic work output from human beings!
- goatlover 1y agoIf only we had created some device that could perform deterministic calculations and then wrote software that made it easy for humans to use such calculations.
- bryanrasmussen 1y agook but humans are idiots, if only we could make some sort of Alternate Idiot, a non-human but every bit as generally stupid as humans are! This A.I would be able to do every stupid thing humans did with the device that performed deterministic calculations only many times faster!
- baconbrand 1y agoYes and when the AI did that all the stupid humans could accept its output without question. This would save the humans a lot of work and thought and personal responsibility for any mistakes! See also Israel’s Lavender for an exciting example of this in action.
- laweijfmvo 1y agoI don't trust humans to do the kind of precise deterministic work you need in a spreadsheet!
- baconbrand 1y agoRight, we shouldn’t use humans or LLMs. We should use regular deterministic computer programs. For cases where that is not available, we should use a human and never an LLM.
- extr 1y ago"regular deterministic computer programs" - otherwise known as the SUM function in Microsoft Excel
- szundi 1y ago[dead]
- davidpolberger 1y agoI like to use Claude Code to write deterministic computer programs for me, which then perform the actual work. It saves a lot of time. I had a big backlog of "nice to have scripts" I wanted to write for years, but couldn't find the time and energy for. A couple of months after I started using Claude Code, most of them exist.
- baconbrand 1y agoThat’s great and the only legitimate use case here. I suspect Microsoft will not try to limit customers to just writing scripts and will instead allow and perhaps even encourage them to let the AI go ham on a bunch of raw data with no intermediary code that could be reviewed. Just a suspicion.
- doug_durham 1y agoSure, but this isn't requiring that the LLM do any math. The LLM is writing formulas and code to do the math. They are very good at that. And like any automated system you need to review the work.
- causal 1y agoExactly, and if it can be done in a way that helps users better understand their own spreadsheets (which are often extremely complex codebases in a single file!) then this could be a huge use case for Claude.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bg24 1y ago"I don't trust LLMs to do the kind of precise deterministic work" => I think LLM is not doing the precise arithmetic. It is the agent with lots of knowledge (skills) and tools. Precise deterministic work is done by tools (deterministic code). Skills brings domain knowledge and how to sequence a task. Agent executes it. LLM predicts the next token.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- zarmin 1y ago>I don't trust LLMs to do the kind of precise deterministic work not just in a spreadsheet, any kind of deterministic work at all. find me a reliable way around this. i don't think there is one. mcp/functions are a band aid and not consistent enough when precision is important. after almost three years of using LLMs, i have not found a single case where i didn't have to review its output, which takes as long or longer than doing it by hand. ML/AI is not my domain, so my knowledge is not deep nor technical. this is just my experience. do we need a new architecture to solve these problems?
- baconbrand 1y agoML/AI is not my domain but you don’t have to get all that technical to understand that LLMs run on probability. We need a new architecture to solve these problems.
- CodeNest 1y ago[dead]
- chpatrick 1y agoThey're not great at arithmetic but at abstract mathematics and numerical coding they're pretty good actually.
- mhh__ 1y agoIf LLMs can replace mathematica for me when I'm doing affine yield curve calculations they can do a DCF for some banker idiots
- sdeframond 1y ago> I don't trust LLMs to do the kind of precise deterministic work you need in a spreadsheet. Rightly so! But LLMs can still make you faster. Just don't expect too much from it.
- mbreese 1y agoI don’t see the issue so much as the deterministic precision of an LLM, but the lack of observability of spreadsheets. Just looking at two different spreadsheets, it’s impossible to see what changes were made. It’s not like programming where you can run a `git diff` to see what changes an LLM agent made to a source code file. Or even a word processing document where the text changes are clear. Spreadsheets work because the user sees the results of complex interconnected values and calculations. For the user, that complexity is hidden away and left in the background. The user just sees the results. This would be a nightmare for most users to validate what changes an LLM made to a spreadsheet. There could be fundamental changes to a formula that could easily be hidden. For me, that the concern with spreadsheets and LLMs - which is just as much a concern with spreadsheets themselves. Try collaborating with someone on a spreadsheet for modeling and you’ll know how frustrating it can be to try and figure out what changes were made.
- informal007 1y agoyou might trust when the precision is extremely high and others agree with that. high precision is possible because they can realize that by multiple cross validations
- prisonguard 1y agoChatGPT is actively being used as a calculator.
- game_the0ry 1y ago> I don't trust LLMs to do the kind of precise deterministic work you need in a spreadsheet. I was thinking along the same lines, but I could not articulate as well as you did. Spreadsheet work is deterministic; LLM output is probabilistic. The two should be distinguished. Still, its a productivity boost, which is always good.
- Kiro 1y agoMost real-world spreadsheets I've worked with were fragile and sloppy, not precise and deterministic. Programmers always get shocked when they realize how many important things are built on extremely messy spreadsheets, and that people simply accept it. They rather just spend human hours correcting discrepancies than trying to build something maintainable.
- bonoboTP 1y agoUsually this is very hard because the tasks and the job often subtly shifts in somewhat unpredictable and unforeseen ways and there is no neat clean abstraction that you can just implement as an application. Too hererogeneous, too messy, too many exceptions. If you develop some clean elegant solution, next week there will be something that your shiny app doesn't allow and they'd have to submit a feature request or whatever. In Excel, it's possible to just ad hoc adjust things and make it up as you go. It's not clean but very adaptable and flexible.
- MangoCoffee 1y agoLLMs are just a tool, though. Humans still have to verify them, like with very other tools out there
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y agoEh, yes. In theory. In practice, and this is what I have experienced personally, bosses seem to think that you now have interns so you should be able to do 5x the output.. guess what that means. No verification or rubber stamp.
- brookst 1y agoDo you trust humans to be precise and deterministic, or even to be especially good at math? This is talking about applying LLMs to formula creation and references, which they are actually pretty good at. Definitely not about replacing the spreadsheet's calculation engine.
- amrocha 1y agoI trust humans to not be able to shoot the company on the foot without even realizing it. Why are we suddenly ok with giving every underpaid and exploited employee a foot gun and expect them to be responsible with it???
- brookst 1y agoMaybe my experience is unique, but I have seen so many security issues from underpaid and exploited employees being successfully phished, among many other abuses. If your experience with the lowest, most-abused employees is better than mine, I envy you.
- amrocha 11mo agoNow imagine your accountant can ask AI to write a formula that calculates EBITDA so he can go back to gambling on basketball faster
- onion2k 1y agoIt's widely known LLMs are terrible at even basic maths. Claude for Excel isn't doing maths. It's doing Excel. If the llm is bad at maths then teaching it to use a tool that's good at maths seems sensible.
- pavel_lishin 1y agoMy concern is that my insurance company will reject a claim, or worse, because of something an LLM did to a spreadsheet. Now, granted, that can also happen because Alex fat-fingered something in a cell, but that's something that's much easier to track down and reverse.
- inquirerGeneral 1y ago[dead]
- manquer 1y agoThey already doing that with AI, rejecting claims at higher numbers than before . Privatized insurance will always find a way to pay out less if they could get away with it . It is just nature of having the trifecta of profit motive , socialized risk and light regulation .
- philipallstar 1y ago> It is just nature of having the trifecta of profit motive , socialized risk and light regulation. It's the nature of everything. They agree to pay you for something. It's nothing specific to "profit motive" in the sense you mean it.
- manquer 1y agoI should have been clearer - profit maximization above all else as long it is mostly legal. Neither profit or profit maximization at all cost is nature of everything . There are many other entity types from unions[1], cooperatives , public sector companies , quasi government entities, PBC, non profits that all offer insurance and can occasionally do it well. We even have some in the US and don’t think it is communism even - like the FDIC or things like social security/ unemployment insurance. At some level government and taxation itself is nothing but insurance ? We agree to paying taxes to mitigate against variety of risks including foreign invasion or smaller things like getting robbed on the street. [1] Historically worker collectives or unions self-organized to socialize the risks of both major work ending injuries or death. Ancient to modern armies operate on because of this insurance the two ingredients that made them not mercenaries - a form of long term insurance benefit (education, pension, land etc) or family members in the event of death and sovereign immunity for their actions.
- doctorpangloss 1y ago> What is with the negativity in these comments? Some people - normal people - understand the difference between the holistic experience of a mathematically informed opinion and an actual model. It's just that normal people always wanted the holistic experience of an answer. Hardly anyone wants a right answer. They have an answer in their heads, and they want a defensible journey to that answer. That is the purpose of Excel in 95% of places it is used. Lately people have been calling this "syncophancy." This was always the problem. Sycophancy is the product. Claude Excel is leaning deeply into this garbage.
- intended 1y agoI used to live in excel. The issue isn’t in creating a new monstrosity in excel. The issue is the poor SoB who has to spelunk through the damn thing to figure out what it does. Excel is the sweet spot of just enough to be useful, capable enough to be extensible, yet gated enough to ensure everyone doesn’t auto run foreign macros (or whatever horror is more appropriate). In the simplest terms - it’s not excel, it’s the business logic. If an excel file works, it’s because theres someone who “gets” it in the firm.
- extr 1y agoI used to live in Excel too. I've trudged through plenty of awful worksheets. The output I've seen from AI is actually more neatly organized than most of what I used to receive in outlook. Most of that wasn't hyper-sophisticated cap table analyses. It was analysis from a Jr Analyst or line employee trying to combine a few different data sources to get some signal on how XYZ function of the business was performing. AI automation is perfectly suitable for this.
- intended 1y agoHow? Neat formatting didn't save any model from having the wrong formula pasted in. Being neat was never a substitute for being well rested, or sufficiently caffeinated. Have you seen how AI functions in the hands of someone who isn't a domain expert? I've used it for things I had no idea about, like Astro+ web dev. User ignorance was magnified spectacularly. This is going to have Jr Analysts dumping well formatted junk in email boxes within a month.
- gedy 1y agoIt's actually really cool. I will say that "spreadsheets" remain a bandaid over dysfunctional UIs, processes, etc and engineering spends a lot of time enabling these bandaids vs someone just saying "I need to see number X" and not "a BI analytics data in a realtime spreadsheet!", etc.
- gadders 1y agoYeah, this could be a pretty big deal. Not everyone is an excel expert, but nearly everyone finds themselves having to work with data in excel at some time or other.
- hbarka 1y agoWhat does scaffolding of spreadsheets mean? I see the term scaffolding frequently in the context of AI-related articles and not familiar with this method and I’m hesitant to ask an LLM.
- Rudybega 1y agoScaffolding typically just refers to a larger state machine style control flow governing an agent's behavior and the suite of external tools it has access to.
- behnamoh 1y ago> How teams use Claude for Excel Who are these teams that can get value from Anthropic? One MCP and my context window is used up and Claude tells me to start a new chat.
- fragmede 1y agoMCPs and context window sizing, putting the engineering into prompt engineering.
- BuildItBusk 1y agoI have to admit that my first thought was “April’s fool”. But you are right. It makes a lot of sense (if they can get it to work well). Not only is Excel the world’s biggest “programming language”. It’s probably also one of the most unintuitive ways to program.
- tokai 1y agoWhats with claiming negativity when most of the comments here are positive?
- bartvk 1y agoI have to remember this one. Waltz into the room and proclaim, why is everyone so negative? It's great because x, y and z. It looks pretty great.
- protonbob 1y ago> but these jobs are going to be the first on the chopping block as these integrations mature. Perhaps this is part of the negativity? This is a bad thing for the middle class.
- jpadkins 1y agoin the short run. In the long run, productivity gains benefit* all of us (in a functional market economy). *material benefit. In terms of spirit and purpose, the older I get the more I think maybe the Amish are on to something. Work gives our lives purpose, and the closer the work is to our core needs, the better it feels. Labor saving so that most of us are just entertaining each other on social networks may lead to a worse society (but hey, our material needs are met!)
- informal007 1y agoagree with you, but it cannot be stopped. development of technology always makes wealth distribution more centralized
- bartvk 1y agoI kind of get what you're saying but can you explain your reasoning or provide a source?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Workaccount2 1y agoI think excel is a dead end. LLM agents will probably greatly prefer SQL, sqlite, and Python instead of bulky made-for-regular-folks excel. Versatility and efficiency explode while human usability tanks, but who cares at that point?
- informal007 1y agoDatabase might be the future, but viable solution on excel are evidence to prove that it works
- informal007 1y agothis will push the development of open source models. people think of privacy at first regards of data, local deployment of open source models are the first choice for them
- threetonesun 1y agoProbably because many people here are software developers, and wrapping spreadsheets in deterministic logic and a consistent UI covers... most software use cases.
- Scubabear68 1y agoHaving wrangled many spreadsheets personally, and worked with CFOs who use them to run small-ish businesses, and all the way up to one of top 3 brokerage houses world-wide using them to model complex fixed income instruments... this is a disaster waiting to happen. Spreadsheet UI is already a nightmare. The formula editing and relationship visioning is not there at all. Mistakes are rampant in spreadsheets, even my own carefully curated ones. Claude is not going to improve this. It is going to make it far, far worse with subtle and not so subtle hallucinations happening left and right. The key is really this - all LLMs that I know of rely on entropy and randomness to emulate human creativity. This works pretty well for pretty pictures and creating fan fiction or emulating someone's voice. It is not a basis for getting correct spreadsheets that show what you want to show. I don't want my spreadsheet correctness to start from a random seed. I want it to spring from first principles.
- noosphr 1y agoMy first job out of uni was building a spreadsheet infra as code version control system after a Windows update made an eight year old spreadsheet go haywire and lose $10m in a afternoon. Spreadsheets are already a disaster.
- daveguy 1y ago> Spreadsheets are already a disaster. Yeah, that's what OP said. Now add a bunch of random hallucinations hidden inside formulas inside cells. If they really have a good spreadsheet solution they've either fixed the spreadsheet UI issues or the LLM hallucination issues or both. My guess is neither.
- sally_glance 1y agoCompared to what? Granted, Excel incidents are probably underreported and might produce "silent" consequential losses. But compared to that, for enterprise or custom software in general we have pretty scary estimates of the damages. Like Y2K (between 300-600bn) and the UK Postal Office thing (~1bn).
- 1y ago
- lacker 1y agoIt's like the negativity whenever a post talks about hiring or firing. A lot of people are afraid that they are going to lose their jobs to AI.
- pluc 1y agoAnthropic now has all your company's data, and all you saved was the cost of one human minus however much they charge for this. The good news is it can't have your data again! So starting from the 163rd-165th person you fire, you start to see a good return and all you've sacrificed is exactitude, precision, judgement, customer service and a little bit of public perception!
- mapt 1y agoThe vast majority of people in business and science are using spreadsheets for complex algorithmic things they weren't really designed for, and we find a metric fuckton of errors in the sheets when you actually bother looking auditing them, mistakes which are not at all obvious without troubleshooting by... manually checking each and every cell & cell relation, peering through parentheses, following references. It's a nightmare to troubleshoot. LLMs specialize in making up plausible things with a minimum of human effort, but their downside is that they're very good at making up plausible things which are covertly erroneous. It's a nightmare to troubleshoot. There is already an abject inability to provision the labor to verify Excel reasoning when it's composed by humans. I'm dead certain that Claude will be able to produce plausibly correct spreadsheets. How important is accuracy to you? How life-critical is the end result? What are your odds, with the current auditing workflow? Okay! Now! Half of the users just got laid off because management thinks Claude is Good Enough. How about now?
- practice9 1y agoLLMs are getting quite good at reviewing the results and implementations, though
- lionkor 1y agoNot really, they're only as good as their context and they do miss and forget important things. It doesn't matter how often, because they do, and they will tell you with 100% confidence and with every synonym of "sure" that they caught it all. That's the issue.
- sothatsit 1y agoI am very confident that these tools are better than the median programmer at code review now. They are certainly much more diligent. An actually useful standard to compare them to is human review, and for technical problems, they definitely pass it. That said, they’re still not great at giving design feedback. But GPT-5 Pro, and to a certain extent GPT-5 Codex, can spot complex bugs like race conditions, or subtly incorrect logic like memory misuse in C, remarkably well. It is a shame GPT-5 Pro is locked behind a $200/month subscription, which means most people do not understand just how good the frontier models are at this type of task now.
- atleastoptimal 1y agoHN has a base of strong anti-AI bias, I assume is partially motivated by insecurity over being replaced, losing their jobs or having missed the boat on the AI.
- extr 1y agoBased on the comments here, it's surprisingly anything in society works at all. I didn't realize the bar was "everything perfect every time, perfectly flexible and adaptable". What a joy some of these folks must be to work with, answering every new technology with endless reasons why it's worthless and will never work.
- jay_kyburz 1y agoI think perhaps you underestimate how antithetical the current batch of LLM AI's is to what most programmers strive for every day, and what we want from our tools. Its not about losing our job, its about "correctness". (or as said below - deterministic) In a lot of jobs, particularly in creative industries, or marketing, media and writing, the definition of a job well done is a fairly grey area. I think AI will be mostly disruptive in these areas. But in programming there is a hard minimum of quality. Given a set of inputs, does the program return the correct answer or not? When you ask it what 2+2, do you get 4? When you ask AI anything, it might be right 50% of the time, or 70% of the time, but you can't blindly trust the answer. A lot of us just find that not very useful.
- Aeolun 1y agoModt of the time when using AI I have a lot more than 1 shot to ensure everything is correct.
- ytoawwhra92 1y ago> But in programming there is a hard minimum of quality. Given a set of inputs, does the program return the correct answer or not? When you ask it what 2+2, do you get 4? Whether something works or not matters less than whether someone will pay for it.
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y agoIt is bad in a very specific sense, but I did not see any other comments express the bad parts instead of focusing merely on the accuracy part ( which is an issue, but not the issue ): - this opens up ridiculous flood of data that would otherwise be semi-private to one company providing this service - this works well small data sets, but will choke on ones it will need to divvy up into chunks inviting interesting ( and yet unknown ) errors There is a real benefit to being able to 'talk to data', but anyone who has seen corporate culture up close and personal knows exactly where it will end. edit: an i saying all this as as person, who actually likes llms.
- mceoin 1y agoI second this. Spreadsheets are the primary tool used for 15% of the U.S. economy. Productivity improvements will affect hundreds of millions of users globally. Each increment in progress is a massive time save and value add. The criticisms broadly fall between "spreadsheets are bad" and "AI will cause more trouble than it solves". This release is a dot in a trend towards everyone having a Goldman-Sachs level analyst at their disposal 24/7. This is a huge deal for the average person or business. Our expectation (disclaimer: I work in this space) is that spreadsheet intelligence will soon be a solved problem. The "harder" problem is the instruction set and human <> machine prompting. For the "spreadsheets are bad" crowd -- sure, they have problems, but users have spoken and they are the preferred interface for analysis, project management and lightweight database work globally. All solutions to "the spreadsheet problem" come with their own UX and usability tradeoffs, so it'a a balance. Congrats to the Claude team and looking forward to the next release!
- bonoboTP 1y ago> Each increment in progress is a massive time save and value add. Based on the history of digitalization of businesses from the 1980s onwards, the spreadsheets will just balloon in number and size and there will be more rules and more procedures and more forms and reports to file until the efficiency gains are neutralized (or almost neutralized).
- mceoin 1y agoWe'll hit a new plateau somewhere, for sure. Still, I'm glad I'm not doing my spreadsheets on paper so net win so far!
- trollbridge 1y agoThe biggest problem with spreadsheets is that they tend to be accounts for the accumulation of technical debt, which is an area that AI tools are not yet very good at retiring, but very good at making additional withdrawals from.
- burnte 1y ago> What is with the negativity in these comments? A lot of us have seen the effects of AI tools in the hands of people who don't understand how or why to use the tools. I've already seen AI use/misuse get two people fired. One was a line-of-business employee who relied on output without ever checking it, got herself into a pretty deep hole in 3 weeks. Another was a C suite person who tried to run an AI tool development project and wasted double their salary in 3 months, nothing to show for it but the bill, fired. In both cases the person did not understand the limits of the tools and kept replacing facts with their desires and their own misunderstanding of AI. The C suite person even tried to tell a vendor they were wrong about their own product because "I found out from AI". AI right now is fireworks. It's great when you know how to use it, but if you half-ass it you'll blow your fingers off very easily.
- liqilin1567 1y agoYeah, the danger lies not in AI itself, but in inexperienced users treating it as a magic solution.
- topaz0 1y agoIt's a bit much to blame the user for this when the product is crafted specifically to give the impression of being magical. Not to mention the marketing and media.
- II2II 1y ago> but these jobs are going to be the first on the chopping block as these integrations mature. I'm not even sure that has to be true anymore. From my admittedly superficial impression of the page, this appears to be a tool for building tools. There are plenty of organizations that are resource constrained, that are doing things the way they have always done thing in Excel, simply because they cannot allocate someone to modify what is already in place to better suit their current needs. For them, this is more of a quality of life and quality of out improvement. This is not like traditional software development, where organizations are far more likely to purchase a product or service to do a job (and where the vendors of those products and services are going to do their best to eliminate developers).
- giancarlostoro 1y agoHonestly as a dev I hate Excel its a whole mess I dont understand. I will gladly use Claude for Excel. It will understand the business needs from the data more than I a mere developer just trying to get back to regular developer work.
- nelox 1y agoIndeed. Take the New Zealand Department of Health as an example; it managed its entire NZD$28 billion budget (USD$16B) in a single Excel spreadsheet. https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/10/nz_health_excel_spreadsheet/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/10/nz_health_excel_sprea... [edit: Added link]
- singleshot_ 1y agoCan’t speak for everyone, but the reason I’m negative in the context of this idea is that it’s a stupid idea.
- timpieces 1y agoYes it's surprising to see so much cynicism for something that has a real possibility of making so many people so much more productive. My mental model of the average excel user is of someone who doesn't care about excel, but cares about their business. If Claude can help them use excel and learn about their business faster, then this should make the world more productive and we all get richer. Claude can make mistakes, but it's not clear to me why people think that the ratio of results to mistakes will get worse here. I think there are many possible reasons why this could not work out, but many of the comments here just seem like unfounded cynicism.
- BowBun 1y agoMy theory: a lot of software we build is the supposed solve for a 'crappy spreadsheet'. a) that isnt' much of a moat, b) you're watching generalization of software happen in real time.
- impjohn 1y agoCrappy spreadsheet is just the codification of business processes. Those are inherently messy and there's lots of assumptions, lots of edge cases. That's why spreadsheets tend towards crappy on a long enough timeline. It's a fundamentally messy problem. Spreadsheets are an abstraction over a messy reality, lossy. They were already generalizing reality. Now we generalize the generalization. It is this lossy reality that people are worried about with AI in HN.
- fragmede 1y ago> What is with the negativity in these comments? > these jobs are going to be the first on the chopping block as these integrations mature. Those two things are maybe related? So many of my friends don't enjoy the same privileges as I do, and have a more tenuous connection to being gainfully employed.
- eviks 1y ago> offense to these people but Sonnet 4.5 is already at the level where it would be able to replicate or beat the level of analysis they typically provide. No offense, but this is pure fantasy. The level of analysis they typically provide doesn't suffer from the same high baseline level of completely made up numbers of your favorite LLM.
- rekabis 1y ago> Even just basic automation/scaffolding of spreadsheets would be a big productivity boost for many employees. When most of it is wild hallucinations? Not really. For many employees leveraging Excel for manipulating important data, it could cripple careers. For spreadsheets that influence financial decisions or touch PPI/PII, it could lead to regulatory disasters and even bankruptcies. Purge hallucinations from LLMs, _then_ let it touch the important shite. Doing it in the reverse order is just begging for a FAFO apocalypse.
- UltraSane 1y agoYou would be far better off using an LLM to replace a complex spreadsheet with a Python script and SQLite.
- 3uler 1y agoThe lady doth protest too much. People see every AI limitation crystal clear, but zero self awareness of their own fallibility.
- vincnetas 1y agoNon-reproducability is the biggest issue here. You deliver a report in 5 minutes to CFO, he comes back after lunch, gives you updated data to adjust a bit of a report and 5 minutes later gets a new report that has some non related to update number changed and asks why? what do you do?
- atwrk 1y agoBecause people will be deeply affected by this, and not in the positive way. We already had this with copilot: https://i.imgur.com/nguIAsv.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/nguIAsv.jpeg Just as with copilot, this combines LLM's inability to repeatably do math correctly with peoples' overassurance in LLM's capabilities.
- hoppp 1y agoI don't like to use excel so if I ever have to touch it I will use AI.
- lizardking 1y agoFirst time at HN?
- ferguess_k 1y ago> No offense to these people but Sonnet 4.5 is already at the level where it would be able to replicate or beat the level of analysis they typically provide. If this is true then why your wife is going to be happy about it? I found it really hard to understand. Do you prefer your wife to be jobless and her employer happily cut costs without impacting productivity? Even if it just replaces the line workers, do you think your wife is going to be safe? I don't get it.
- slightwinder 1y ago> What is with the negativity in these comments? Excel and AIs are huge clusterfucks on their own, where insane errors happens for various reasons. Combine them, and maybe we will see improvement, but surely we will see catastrophic outcomes which could not only ruin the lives of ordinary people, whole companies and countries, as already happened before...