Many fears of “AI mucking it up” could be mitigated with an ability to connect a workbook to a git repository. Not for data, but for VBA, cell formulas, and cell metadata. When you can encapsulate the changes a contributor (in this case co-pilot) makes into a commit, you can more easily understand what changes it/they made.
I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
81–90 of 346 posts
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#82I find the contrast between two narratives around technology use so fascinating: 1. We advocate automation because people like Brenda are error-prone and machines are perfect. 2. We disavow AI because people like Brenda are perfect and the machine is error-prone. These aren't contradictions because we only advocate for automation in limited contexts: when the task is understandable, the execution is reliable, the pro…
It's not as black-and-white as "Brenda good, AI bad". It's much more nuanced than this.
When it comes to (traditional) coding, for the most part, when I program a function to do X, every single time I run that function from now until the heat death of the sun, it will always produce Y. Forever! When it does, we understand why, and when it doesn't, we also can understand why it didn't!
When I use AI to perform X, every single time I run that AI from now until the heat death of the sun it will maybe produce Y. Forever! When it does, we don't understand why, and when it doesn't, we also don't understand why!
We know that Brenda might screw up sometimes but she doesn't run at the speed of light, isn't able to produce a thousand lines of Excel Macro in 3 seconds, doesn't hallucinate (well, let's hope she doesn't), can follow instructions etc. If she does make a mistake, we can find it, fix it, ask her what happened etc. before the damage is too great.
In short: when AI does anything at all, we only have, at best, a rough approximation of why it did it. With Brenda, it only takes a couple of questions to figure it out!
Before anyone says I'm against AI, I love it and am neck-deep in it all day when programming (not vibe-coding!) so I have a full understanding of what I'm getting myself into but I also know its limitations!
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#83Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#84I find the contrast between two narratives around technology use so fascinating: 1. We advocate automation because people like Brenda are error-prone and machines are perfect. 2. We disavow AI because people like Brenda are perfect and the machine is error-prone. These aren't contradictions because we only advocate for automation in limited contexts: when the task is understandable, the execution is reliable, the pro…
This misunderstands complexity entirely:
The complexity of the task isn't a factor - it's complex to generate correct machine code, but we trust compilers to do it all the time.
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#85This quote is pulled from a TikTok, I recommend watching the whole thing here: https://www.tiktok.com/@belligerentbarbies/video/75683800086... (I pulled the quote by using yt-dlp to grab the MP4 and then running that through MacWhisper to generate a transcript.)
It's a little over two paragraphs. Seems like it would have been simpler just to... type it out?
But then you would need a Brenda. Ai can write the automation script for you.
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#86Using ai does not absolve you from the responsibility of doing it correctly. If you use ai, then you better have the skills to have done the job yourself, and so have the ability to check the AI did things correctly.
You can save time still, but perhaps not as much as you think, because you need to check the ai's work thoroughly.
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#87I find the contrast between two narratives around technology use so fascinating: 1. We advocate automation because people like Brenda are error-prone and machines are perfect. 2. We disavow AI because people like Brenda are perfect and the machine is error-prone. These aren't contradictions because we only advocate for automation in limited contexts: when the task is understandable, the execution is reliable, the pro…
The reason is oftentimes fairly simple, certain people have their material wealth and income threatened by such automation, and therefore it's bad (an intellectualized reason is created post-hoc)
I predict there will actually be a lot of work to be done on the "software engineering" side w.r.t. improving reliability and safety as you allude to, for handing off to less than sentient bots. Improved snapshot, commit, undo, quorum, functionalities, this sort of thing.
The idea that the AI should step into our programs without changing the programs whatsoever around the AI is a horseless carriage.
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#88I'm actually not that worried about this, because again I would classify this as a problem that already exists. There are already idiots in senior management who pass off bullshit and screw things up. There are natural mechanisms to cope with this, primarily in business reputation - if you're one of those idiots who does this people very quickly start just discounting what you're saying, they might not know how you'r…
Nudge theory isn't useless, it's just not anything like as powerful as money or regulation.
It was taken up by the UK government at that time because the government was, unusually, a coalition of two quite different parties, and thus found it hard to agree to actually use the normal levers of power.
This NY Times opinion piece by Loewenstein and Ubel makes some good arguments along these lines: https://web.archive.org/web/20250906130827/https://www.nytim...
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#89Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#90Excel is the “beast that drives the ENTIRE economy” and he’s worried about Brenda from the finance department losing her job because then her boss will get bad financial reports I suppose the person that wrote that have not ideia Excel is just an app builder where you embed data together with code. You know that we have excel because computers didn’t understand column names in databases and so data extraction needed…
In most cases where the excel spreadsheet is business critical, the spreadsheet _is_ the database. These companies aren’t using an erp system. They are directly entering inventory and sales numbers in the spreadsheet.