I'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

hey 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.

Hi! Nothing public nor generic enough to be a good building block. I found myself often frustrated by the tools that came out of the box but I believe better apis could make this slightly easier to solve.

The UX of spreadsheet diffs is a hard one to solve because of how weird the calculation loops are and how complicated the relationship between fields might be.

I've never tried to solve this for a real end user before in a generic way - all my past work here was for internal ability to audit changes and rollback catastrophes. I took a lot of shortcuts by knowing which cells are input data vs various steps of calculations -- maybe part of your ux is being able to define that on a sheet by sheet basis? Then you could show how different data (same formulas) changed outputs or how different formulas (same data) did differently?

Spreadsheets are basically weird app platforms at this point so you might not be able to create a single experience that is both deep and generic. On the other hand maybe treating it as an app is the unlock? Get your AI to noodle on what the whole thing is for, then show diff between before and after stable states (after all calculation loops stabilize or are killed) side by side with actual diffs of actual formulas? I feel like Id want to see a diff as a live final spreadsheet and be able to click on changed cells and see up the chain of their calculations to the ancestors that were modified.

Fun problem that sounds extremely complicated. Good luck distilling it!