Hacker News Reader

Comment by rsavage | Hacker News Reader

So many companies (including mine) built software to replace spreadsheets - but of course spreadsheets are great because you can do anything you want.

When there is no 'standard' way of doing things, you end up writing feature after feature to meet all the different ways people want/need to use the software to replace their spreadsheets.

Eventually it just becomes a huge messy. If instead we allows our customers to customize the software themselves, so each customer got what they needed, but still had the core backend, data, and shared functionality shared between them maybe we could build simpler software again that also does.

Maybe they can just vibe everything themselves, but vibe coded features feel like a solid middle ground.

I know of rough.app and vendo.run trying to allow vibe coded features, but I haven't seen anything take off like lovable yet. Is there something out there that is being widely used that lets any software become malleable?

View on HN

> So many companies (including mine) built software to replace spreadsheets - but of course spreadsheets are great because you can do anything you want.

This is doubly ironic, because so, so many companies would be much more useful for the customers if delivered as a spreadsheet file for download.

I know, I worked for one too; said so in the meetings many times, especially watching the frontend side screwing up tables in SPA so they would choke rendering couple dozen rows of numbers.

So much time, effort and money is spent on designing subpar products and services, where spreadsheets would do better, simply because the value of using a spreadsheet goes 100% to users, and it cannot be that users reap all the value of their work, without a host of businesses capturing most of it along the way.

The whole point of replacing spreadsheets with a SaaS is usually to lock-in a specific "user journey" and force users to follow it, and this rarely if ever serves the user.

Maybe the real lesson from spreadsheets is that the customization layer isn't a feature, it's the product

I have been working on exactly this with Filestash (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash), out of millions of users, 99% of them don't seem to care so much about the malleability, it gets very usefull when a company ask for something that 99.99% of people don't care without having to add yet another setting toggle. A recent example was when supporting gobd compliance deployment which required us to sign logs via a vendor who can deliver a qualified electronic signature for which nobody outside Europe would care about

That's a really useful data point. Maybe malleability doesn't need to be something 99% of users actively care about

> Is there something out there that is being widely used that lets any software become malleable?

Spreadsheets.

Or, maybe something very close to spreadsheets but that can also deviate from the rectangular cell grid topology.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com