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I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

simonwillison.net

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Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#201

Post by dist-epoch »

intended wrote: post #109
motoboi wrote: post #26

Excel 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…

Found the person who hasn’t seen excel in the real world. Excel - whatever its origin story - is the actual Swiss Army knife of the tech world. There’s easily a few billion people who use excel. There is a reason it survives.

20+% of the world population uses Excel? Any citations on that?

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#202

Post by conductr »

wat10000 wrote: post #175
conductr wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I'd agree. Programming is a solid use case for AI. Programming is a part of my job, and hobby too, and that's the main place where I've seen some value with it. It still is not living up to the hype but for simple things, like building a website or helping me generate the proper SQL to get what I want - it helps and can be faster than writing by hand. It's pretty much replaced StackOverflow for helping me debug things or look up how to do something that I know is already solved somewhere and I don't want to reinvent. But, I've also seen it make a complete mess of my codebase anytime I try to build something larger. It might technically give me a working widget after some vibe coding, but I'm probably going to have to clean the whole thing up manually and refactor some of it. I'm not certain that it's more efficient than just doing it myself from the start.

Every other facet of the world that AI is trying to 'take over', is not programming. Programming is writing text, what AI is good at. It's using references to other code, which AI has been specifically trained on. Etc. It makes sense that that use case is coming along well. Everything else, not even close IMO. Unless it's similar. It's probably great at helping people draft emails and finish their homework. I don't have those pain points.

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#203

Post by jimbokun »

dionian wrote: post #102
conductr wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not even greater trust. It’s just passive trust. The thing is, Brenda is her own QA department. Every good Brenda is precisely good because she checks her own work before shipping it. AI does not do this. It doesn’t even fully understand the problem/question sometimes yet provides a smart definitive sounding answer. It’s like the doctor on The Simpson’s, if you can’t tell he’s a quack, you probably would follow…

Brenda + AI > Brenda

Yes but:

    (CEO + AI) - Brenda

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#204

Post by simonw »

WhyOhWhyQ wrote: post #184
quixoticaxolotl wrote: post #39

I 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…

I'm disappointed that my human life has no value in a world of AI. You can retort with "ah but you'll be entertained and on super-drugs so you won't care!", but I would further retort that I'd rather live in a universe where I can contribute something, no matter how small.

The current generation of AI tools augment humans, they don't replace them.

One of the most under-rated harms of AI at the moment is this sense of despair it causes in people who take the AI vendors at their word ("AGI! Outperform humans at most economically valuable work!")

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#205

Post by simonw »

danjl wrote: post #198

Excel is programming. Spreadsheets have been full of bugs for decades. How is Brenda any different from a developer? Why are people scared when the LLM might affect their dollar calculations, and less bothered when it affects their product?

+100 this. Programmers who work in Excel (and never even dream of calling themselves programmers) are still programmers.

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#206

Post by jimbokun »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #61
RegW wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But that’s not what Brenda was hired for. Are you suggesting that Brenda should stay in her box?

No, I’m suggesting that she is ineffective exactly because she stays in her box. She should replaced with someone who says, “this box doesn’t need to be here… there is a better way of doing things.” NOT to be confused with the junior engineer who comes into a project and says it’s garbage and suggests we rewrite it from scratch in ${hotLanguage} because they saw it on a blog somewhere.

> She should replaced with someone who says, “this box doesn’t need to be here… there is a better way of doing things.”

The article is about this kind of Brenda.

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#207

Post by [deleted] »

candiddevmike wrote: post #57
Aeolun wrote: post #42

Earlier 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?

[deleted]

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#208

Post by jimbokun »

trenchpilgrim wrote: post #47
self_awareness wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see that MacWhisper uses parakeet v2 as the model (although it allows choosing another model). Is MacWhisper a $60 GUI for a Python script that just runs the model?

> Is MacWhisper a $60 GUI for a Python script that just runs the model? Yes, a large genre of MacOS apps are "Native GUI wrappers around OSS scripts"

A lot of MacOS itself is this.

Which is incredibly value. The OSS script has zero value to someone who doesn't know it exists or doesn't understand how to run it.

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#209

Post by jimbokun »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #34
glimshe wrote: post #9

This reminds me of a friend whose company ran a daily perl script that committed every financial transaction of the day to a database. Without the script, the company could literally make no money irrespectively of sales because this database was one piece in a complex system for payment processor interoperability. The script ran in a machine located at the corner of a cubicle and only one employee had the admin pass…

That sounds pretty bad. Not a great argument against AI: "Our employees have created such a bad mess that AI wont work because only they know how the mess they created works".

> "Our employees have created such a bad mess that AI wont work because only they know how the mess they created works".

This is an ironclad argument against fully replacing employees with AI.

Every single organization on Earth requires the people who were part of creating the current mess to be involved in keeping the organization functioning.

Yes you can improve the current mess. But it's still just a slightly better mess and you still need some of the people around who have been part of creating the new mess.

Just run a thought experiment: every employee in a corporation mysteriously disappear from the face of the Earth. If you bring in an equal number of equally talented people the next day to run it, but with no experience with the current processes of the corporation, how long will it take to get to the same capability of the previous employees?

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#210

Post by hmmokidk »

quixoticaxolotl wrote: post #39

I 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…

Non deterministic vs deterministic automation
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