Excel doesn't need AI to ruin your work: https://www.science.org/content/article/one-five-genetics-pa...
I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
171–180 of 346 posts
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#172[dead]
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We disavow AI because people like Brenda are perfect and the machine is error-prone. No, no. We disavow AI because our great leaders inexplicably trust it more than Brenda.
I don't understand why generative AI gets a pass at constantly being wrong, but an average worker would be fired if they performed the same way. If a manager needed to constantly correct you or double check your work, you'd be out. Why are we lowering the bar for generative AI?
I've been trying to open my mind and "give AI a chance" lately. I spent all day yesterday struggling with Claude Code's utter incompetence. It behaves worse than any junior engineer I've ever worked with:
- It says it's done when its code does not even work, sometimes when it does not even compile.
- When asked to fix a bug, it confidently declares victory without actually having fixed the bug.
- It gets into this mode where, when it doesn't know what to do, it just tries random things over and over, each time confidently telling me "Perfect! I found the error!" and then waiting for the inevitable response from me: "No, you didn't. Revert that change".
- Only when you give it explicit, detailed commands, "modify fade_output to be -90," will it actually produce decent results, but by the time I get to that level of detail, I might as well be writing the code myself.
To top it off, unlike the junior engineer, Claude never learns from its mistakes. It makes the same ones over and over and over, even if you include "don't make XYZ mistake" in the prompt. If I were an eng manager, Claude would be on a PIP.
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#174That mirrors my experience as well. LLMs get instantly confused in real world scenarios in Excel and confidently hallucinate millions in errors If you look at the demos for these it’s always something that is clean and abundantly available in training data. Like an income statement. Or a textbook example DCF. Or my personal fav „here is some data show me insights“. Real world excel use looks nothing like that. I’m ge…
As somebody with non-existent experience with Excel, I could totally see myself getting a lot of value out of LLMs, if nothing else then simply for telling me what's possible, what functions and patterns exist at all etc.
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Brenda + AI > Brenda
That’s definitely the hype. But I don’t know if I agree. I’m essentially a Brenda in my corporate finance job and so far have struggled to find any useful scenarios to use AI for. I thought once this can build me a Gantt chart because that’s an annoying task in excel. I had the data. When I asked it to help me, “I can’t do that but I can summarize your data”. Not helpful. Any type of analysis is exactly what I don’t…
I can't speak to finance. In programming, it can be useful but it takes some time and effort to find where it works well.
I have had no success in using it to create production code. It's just not good enough. It tends to pattern-match the problem in somewhat broad strokes and produce something that looks good but collapses if you dig into it. It might work great for CRUD apps but my work is a lot more fiddly than that.
I've had good success in using it to create one-off helper scripts to analyze data or test things. For code that doesn't have to be good and doesn't have to stand the test of time, it can do alright.
I've had great success in having it do relatively simple analysis on large amounts of code. I see a bug that involves X, and I know that it's happening in Y. There's no immediately obvious connection between X and Y. I can dig into the codebase and trace the connection. Or I can ask the machine to do it. The latter is a hundred times faster.
The key is finding things where it can produce useful results and you can verify them quickly. If it says X and Y are connected by such-and-such path and here's how that triggers the bug, I can go look at the stuff and see if that's actually true. If it is, I've saved a lot of time. If it isn't, no big loss. If I ask it to make some one-off data analysis script, I can evaluate the script and spot-check the results and have some confidence. If I ask it to modify some complicated multithreaded code, it's not likely to get it right, and the effort it takes to evaluate its output is way too much for it to be worthwhile.
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#176I 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…
There are other narratives going on in the background though both called out by the article and implied, including:
Brenda probably has annual refresher courses on GAAP, while her exec and the AI don't.
Automation is expected to be deterministic. The outputs can be validated for a given input. If you need some automation more than Excel functions, writing a power automate flow or recording an office script is sufficient & reliable as automation while being cheaper than AI. Can you validate AI as deterministic? This is important for accounting. Maybe you want some thinking around how to optimize a business process, but not for following them.
Brenda as the human-in-the-loop using AI will be much more able than her exec. Will Brenda + AI be better (or more valuable considering the cost of AI) than Brenda alone? That's the real question, I suppose.
AI in many aspects of our life is simply not good right now. For a lot of applications, AI is perpetually just a few years away from being as useful as you describe. If we get there, great.
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have absolutely descended, and rapidly, into “computers do whatever the fuck they want and there’s nothing you can do about it” in the past 5 years, and gen AI is only half of the problem. The other half comes from how incredibly opinionated and controlling the tech giants have become. Microsoft doesn’t even ALLOW consent on windows (yes or maybe later), Google is doing all it can to turn the entire internet into…
We have come a LONG way from the "Where do you want to go today?" of the 90s. Now, it's "You're going where we tell you that you can go, whether you like it or not!"
Flash-backs to dial-up and making sure I had my list of websites written down and ready for when I connected.
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#178I 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…
"Thinking mode" only provides the illusion of debuggability. It improves performance by generating more tokens which hopefully steer the context towards one more likely to produce the desired response, but the tokens it generates do not reflect any sort of internal state or "reasoning chain" as we understand it in human cognition. They are still just stochastic spew. You have no more insight into why the model genera…
I'm always amused when I see comments saying, "I asked it why it produced that answer, and it said...." Sorry, you've badly misunderstood how these things work. It's not analyzing how it got to that answer. It's producing what it "thinks" the response to that question should look like.
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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! To make this even worse, it may even produce Y just enough times to make it seem reliable and then it is unleashed without supervision, running thousands or millions of times, wrecking havoc pr…
Exactly. Fundamentally, I want my computer's computations to be deterministic, not probabilistic. And, I don't want the results to arbitrarily change because some company 1,500 miles away from me up-and-decided to "train some new model" or whatever it is they do. A computer program should deliver reliable, consistent output if it is consistently given the same input. If I wanted inconsistency and unreliability, I'd a…
It's not arbitrary ... your precise and deterministic, multi-year, financial analysis needs to be corrected every so often for left-wing bias.
/s ffs
Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand why generative AI gets a pass at constantly being wrong, but an average worker would be fired if they performed the same way. If a manager needed to constantly correct you or double check your work, you'd be out. Why are we lowering the bar for generative AI?
I've been trying to open my mind and "give AI a chance" lately. I spent all day yesterday struggling with Claude Code's utter incompetence. It behaves worse than any junior engineer I've ever worked with: - It says it's done when its code does not even work, sometimes when it does not even compile. - When asked to fix a bug, it confidently declares victory without actually having fixed the bug. - It gets into this mo…
Learning to use Claude Code (and similar coding agents) effectively takes quite a lot of work.
Did you have it creating and running automated tests as it worked?