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I don't trust humans to do the kind of precise deterministic work you need in a spreadsheet!

Right, 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.

"regular deterministic computer programs" - otherwise known as the SUM function in Microsoft Excel

I 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.

That’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.

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