It’s interesting to me that this page talks a lot about “debugging models” etc. I would’ve expected (from the title) this to be going after the average excel user, similar to how chatgpt went after every day people.
I would’ve expected “make a vlookup or pivot table that tells me x” or “make this data look good for a slide deck” to be easier problems to solve.
I think actually Anthropic themselves are having trouble with imagining how this could be used. Coders think like coders - they are imagining the primary use case being managing large Excel sheets that are like big programs. In reality most Excel worksheets are more like tiny, one-off programs. More like scripts than applications. AI is very very good at scripts.
The issue is that the average Excel user doesn’t quite have the skills to validate and double-check the Excel formulas that Claude would produce, and to correct them if needed. It would be similar to a non-programmer vibe-coding an app. And that’s really not what you want to happen for professionally used Excel sheets.
IMO that is exactly what people want. At my work everyone uses LLMs constantly and the trade off of not perfect information is known. People double check it, etc, but the information search is so much faster even if it finds the right confluence but misquotes it, it still sends me the link.
For easy spreadsheet stuff (which 80% of average white collars workers are doing when using excel) I’d imagine the same approach. Try to do what I want, and even if you’re half wrong the good 50% is still worth it and a better starting point.
Vibe coding an app is like vibe coding a “model in excel”. Sure you could try, but most people just need to vibe code a pivot table
I think this is aiming to be Claude Code for people who use Excel as a programming environment.