Ask HN: Is AI the New Spreadsheet? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is AI the New Spreadsheet?

7 pointsGshaheen6 comments

Spreadsheets became and still are prolific for individuals and teams to create simple “apps.”

I wonder how much of that is moving over to things like cowork or codex type apps.

Personally, and anecdotally, my spreadsheet use has dropped immensely since starting to use these tools.

Thoughts?

No. It's more like Windows NT in 1994: managers and CxO's love it as they've been privately promised that it can rid them of a substantial percentage of those arrogant programmers, and buyers and other corporate agents love it since they can standardize on something, and they don't have to deal with more than one or two vendors.

Current AI also has some similarities to NFTs, in that a lot of dubious people, who have never shown any technical ability before are pushing it pretty damn hard on technical grounds.

Deterministic tools are very useful for people that need a single answer that is verifiably correct (or at least wrong in a way that follows a deterministic process).

Plus, very few orgs are letting employees run up cloud spend bills to replace spreadsheets.

I find it more useful to have AI create a deterministic and reusable tool, rather than ask it for the answer to the question I’m trying to answer.

A silly example from last week. I am always curious to know which months I’ll get 3 paychecks instead of 2 (getting paid biweekly this usually happens twice per year). I asked AI, it gave me an answer, but when verifying against a calendar, it was wrong. I then asked the AI to make a simple HTML page that let me pick an anchor date for a paycheck, and visually showed me the next 10 years of the pay schedule. I opened the resulting file, it was correct, and now I have a deterministic tool I can use any time I have this question.

AI still seems bad with data, but it can create simple tools to help with data. I think that’s where the actual value is, but I don’t think the average user is doing things this way.

I second this, it's still bad with calculations but good enough for some shell scripting that I can quickly verify.

AI with deterministic tools to do everything you can on spreadsheets can be a real thing. The speed at which spreadsheet ninjas operate. That speed is an outcome of muscle memory built on hours of operating on spreadsheets. Asking AI a question and it responding with an answer is slower than that ( even if you somehow solve for its non determinism ).

How fast can AI (not necessarily conversational) get you from you question to answer is the real underlying question

Today’s AI is undoubtedly far more powerful and consequential than technologies like Excel were in their time. It is still difficult to predict how profoundly AI will transform humanity because we are living through that transformation right now. We will probably have to wait until sometime in the future before we can accurately evaluate its true impact.

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