I second this. Spreadsheets are the primary tool used for 15% of the U.S. economy. Productivity improvements will affect hundreds of millions of users globally. Each increment in progress is a massive time save and value add.
The criticisms broadly fall between "spreadsheets are bad" and "AI will cause more trouble than it solves".
This release is a dot in a trend towards everyone having a Goldman-Sachs level analyst at their disposal 24/7. This is a huge deal for the average person or business. Our expectation (disclaimer: I work in this space) is that spreadsheet intelligence will soon be a solved problem. The "harder" problem is the instruction set and human <> machine prompting.
For the "spreadsheets are bad" crowd -- sure, they have problems, but users have spoken and they are the preferred interface for analysis, project management and lightweight database work globally. All solutions to "the spreadsheet problem" come with their own UX and usability tradeoffs, so it'a a balance.
Congrats to the Claude team and looking forward to the next release!
> Each increment in progress is a massive time save and value add.
Based on the history of digitalization of businesses from the 1980s onwards, the spreadsheets will just balloon in number and size and there will be more rules and more procedures and more forms and reports to file until the efficiency gains are neutralized (or almost neutralized).
[founder here] Zapier, n8n, Agentkit, etc all have the user define a flowchart in software. This is a lot of work to set up and brittle -- can't work around edge cases & nuance.
We use an agent for execution -- so the LLM decides what to do at every step. No flowchart at all -- just text instructions.
For now we're pretty obsessed with the spreadsheet interface, but we do think of Sourcetable as a spreadsheet-based application platform, so there multi-modal plans in the future.
For now, one fun experience is loading the app on Mobile and just talking to your database. It's the same as talking from a desktop but can feel far more natural and the form factor let's you get quick business answers on the go.
Separate to the Superagents launch here, LLMs are excellent for keyword optimizations since the compression/summary/synthesis essentially comes for free out of the box. This isn't unique to Sourcetable, but I do find it extremely pleasant that vector analysis with LLMs is easy, not hard. SEM/SEO is all just math at the end of the day.
The main things we bring to the table are that the AI can write code and handle much larger datasets than fit in ChatGPT, etc., and also that Superagents you can pipe your data in without code or SaaS interface kludge, so you can ask much more complicated questions than you usually might if you're not great at cleaning, filtering or analyzing data.
As naive as this may sound, when I first moved to America and was deciding where to base myself, I first had to learn that there was a difference between Silicon Valley (i.e. Peninsula / South Bay) and San Francisco.
From there, San Francisco looks quite small, but many neighborhoods are worlds away from the action - Outer Richmond is not the density of networks you are looking for, for example (better than rest of world, suboptimal for SF).
Co-locating close to the center of these dense founder networks is the best way maximize luck and opportunity.
This map isn't perfect, but it makes it pretty obvious where you should move if you're interested in startups.
Career wise, moving to "the center of the network" is still the best decision I ever made.
Sourcetable.com | Product Marketing (contract) | San Francisco
We're building a spreadsheet-based operating system for the web, although on first touch Sourcetable feels more like Excel Copilot or "Cursor for spreadsheets".
We're looking for one Product Marketer to join our team in a part-time contract capacity in the Bay Area (San Francisco preferred). The requirement are that you need to be great at video storytelling and also be strong at spreadsheets & analysis.
Everyone on our team codes, and you should too. There's no technical requirement for the role, per-se, but we have found it is better this way.
The criticisms broadly fall between "spreadsheets are bad" and "AI will cause more trouble than it solves".
This release is a dot in a trend towards everyone having a Goldman-Sachs level analyst at their disposal 24/7. This is a huge deal for the average person or business. Our expectation (disclaimer: I work in this space) is that spreadsheet intelligence will soon be a solved problem. The "harder" problem is the instruction set and human <> machine prompting.
For the "spreadsheets are bad" crowd -- sure, they have problems, but users have spoken and they are the preferred interface for analysis, project management and lightweight database work globally. All solutions to "the spreadsheet problem" come with their own UX and usability tradeoffs, so it'a a balance.
Congrats to the Claude team and looking forward to the next release!