Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans
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Re: Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans
#2Hey HN, I’m Matt, the founder of Nobie. I started my career in banking and haven’t been able to shake the deep reverence I have for Excel. I grew up on it.
There are many good attempts to reinvent spreadsheets. We’re doing something different. We don’t want people to adopt a new language or move their work to another format. Instead, we want to improve how the Excel language is run and give people a choice of where to run it.
That’s what we’re building with Nobie: a second Excel-compatible runtime. It’s available as a native Mac app and as a CLI for macOS and Linux. The engine is written from first principles in Rust.
Nobie isn’t done. We are not at Excel parity today. Some features are missing.
We’re a team of four systems engineers. For the next eight weeks, all our work is going into closing those gaps.
Nobie is free and always will be for everything you can do in Excel.
Try it with a real workbook and tell us what breaks. The complicated and ugly ones are especially welcome.
Re: Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans
#3I'm one of the engineers on the team. We're really excited to be putting this out into the world. There's a massive amount of functionality in this thing that we're hoping will make the lives of everyone who needs to work with xlsx files better. Both programmatically and with a GUI.
See https://nobie.com/cli for the dev focused aspects, but I'm really proud of this thing, and happy that most people will be able to use it for free.
Happy to answer any questions people have.
Re: Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans
#4Maybe the title should mention MacOS not "agents and humans"?
Re: Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans
#5Maybe the title should mention MacOS not "agents and humans"?
CLI works on linux too. Windows CLI will be out this week.
The GUI already runs on linux, but we didn't want to muddy the launch page today. It will likely be out this week.
Re: Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans
#6Some features I think are pretty cool:
- We can render pixel perfect PNGs and PDFs (native vectorized PDFs)
- You can pass an xlsx, inputs, and output cells, and get a JSON API from any excel workbook
- You can pipe a postgres query into an xlsx file, and then run excel formulas over it
- You can pretty easily setup a `git diff` helper for xlsx files that shows you the changes you care about
- We have a built-in terminal, auto-launchers for Claude and Codex (with some fancy hooks that inject context when you send messages) and a pretty good MCP. After you install Nobie you're agents can do pretty much anything in an xlsx. We also provide a lot of tools that give agents high-signal information about the workbook, so they can quickly get up to speed and do good work
- You can programmatically edit workbooks in pleasant ways, and the workbook will update properly, AND recalc incrementally, AND the numbers will tie with Excel (if they don't definitely let us know, but we've put a huge amount of work into making sure they do)
- There's a bunch of examples on the CLI page on the website, but a lot of previously impossible/very hard things are now pretty trivial with our CLI, and I think this'll be really useful for for a lot of devs (the CLI will be getting better throughout this week, I have a lot more stuff I want to do with this)
- Happy to talk technical details. Everything is from scratch, and our render and calc engines have been a massive amount of work.
Re: Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans
#7Very cool. Excited to try this out sometime!
Re: Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans
#8Would love a good, modern Excel alternative. A few feature requests:
- Ability to set european number style as standard
- Ability to import/open csv
Re: Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans
#9Would love a good, modern Excel alternative. A few feature requests: - Ability to set european number style as standard - Ability to import/open csv
- We had a bet internally about how long it'd take for someone to complain about default number styles, we'll get this in by tomorrow
- CSV import can be done today either by using claude / codex and telling them to load the CSV into nobie (we install an MCP on first boot of the app, and we have a really nice built-in terminal, you can click the claude / codex buttons in the top button bar to launch them), or using the CLI. We're working on a GUI workflow for it, but CSV is a cursed format, so we want to do it better than Excel
Re: Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans
#10Tangential, but what's the art style of those images throughout the page? I really like them.