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Comment by mapt

The vast majority of people in business and science are using spreadsheets for complex algorithmic things they weren't really designed for, and we find a metric fuckton of errors in the sheets when you actually bother looking auditing them, mistakes which are not at all obvious without troubleshooting by... manually checking each and every cell & cell relation, peering through parentheses, following references. It's a nightmare to troubleshoot.

LLMs specialize in making up plausible things with a minimum of human effort, but their downside is that they're very good at making up plausible things which are covertly erroneous. It's a nightmare to troubleshoot.

There is already an abject inability to provision the labor to verify Excel reasoning when it's composed by humans.

I'm dead certain that Claude will be able to produce plausibly correct spreadsheets. How important is accuracy to you? How life-critical is the end result? What are your odds, with the current auditing workflow?

Okay! Now! Half of the users just got laid off because management thinks Claude is Good Enough. How about now?

parent mapt 1 year ago

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