At Databricks summit there was a nice presentation [0] by the CEO of V7 labs who showed a demo of their LLM + Spreadsheet product.
The kneejerk reaction of “ugh, LLM and spreadsheet?!” is understandable, but I encourage you to watch that demo. It makes clear some obvious potentials of LLMs in spreadsheets. They can basically be an advanced autofill. If you’ve used CoPilot in VSCode, you understand the satisfaction of feeling like an LLM is thinking one step ahead of you. This should be achievable in spreadsheets as well.
[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=0SVilfbn-HY&t=1251 (queued to demo at 20:51)
> If you’ve used CoPilot in VSCode, you understand the satisfaction of feeling like an LLM is thinking one step ahead of you
That "satisfaction" vanished pretty damn quickly, once I realised that I have often more work correcting the stuff so generated than I would have had writing it myself in the first place.
LLMs in programming absolutely have their uses, Lots of them actually, and I don't wanna miss them. But they are not "thinking ahead" of the code I write, not by a long shot.
I really don’t know what the detractors of Copilot are writing, the next StuxNet? Whether I’m doing stupid EDA or writing some fairly original frameworks Copilot has always been useful to me writing both boilerplate code as well as completing more esoteric logic. There’s definitely a slight modification I have made in how I type (making variable names obvious, stopping at the right moment knowing copilot will complete the next etc) but if anything it has made me a cleaner programmer who writes 50% less characters at the minimum.
While it could be that you and them work on different kinds of code, I believe it's just as likely that you're just different people with different experience and expectations.
A "wow, that's a great start" to one could be a "damn there's an issue I need to fix with this" to another. To some, that great start really makes them more productive. To others that 80% solution slows them down.
For some reason, programmers just love to be zealots and run flamewars to promote their tool of choice. Probably because they genuinely experience it's fantastic for them, and the other guy's tool wasn't, and they want them to see the light, too.
I prefer to judge people on the quality of their output, not the tools they use to produce it. There's evidently great code being written with uEmacs (Linux, Git), and I assume that, all the way on the other end of the spectrum, there's probably great code being written with VSCode and Copilot.
In my experience using LLMs like CoPilot:
Web server work in Go, Python, and front end work in JavaScript - it's pretty good. Only when I try to do something truly application specific that it starts to get tripped up.
Multi threading python work - not bad, but occasionally makes some mistakes in understanding scope or appropriate safe memory access, which can be show stopping.
Deep learning, computer vision work - it gets some common pytorch patterns down pat, and basic computer vision work that you'd typically find tutorials for but struggles on any unique task.
Reinforcement learning for simulated robotics environments - it really struggles to keep up.
ROS2 - fantastic for most of the framework code for robotics projects, really great and recommended for someone getting used to ROS.
C++ work - REALLY struggles with anything beyond basic stuff. I was working with threading the other day and turned it off as all of its suggestions would never compile let alone do anything sensible.
They are with me. And with many other people. Perhaps it's the quality of your code that is preventing better completions.(Or the lang you use?)
There are a few things that really help the AI to understand what you want to do, otherwise it might struggle and come up with not so good code.
Not to say it gets it right everytime, but definitely often enough for me not to even consider turning it off. The time save has been tremendous.
I can see vague blaming the person becoming more the norm when LLMs are responsible for precrime and restrictions etc.
“Oh you couldn’t take a train to work? Must have been something you did, the Palantir is usually great and helps our society. It always works great for me and my friends.”
Nah, that's not it. It's more like complaining that someone has to drive the train and therefore "is completely useless to me, it can't read my mind so it's trash".
That's because you were using CoPilot. Try a much better option such as Supermaven. I unsubscribed from CoPilot for similar reasons but after using Supermaven for 3-4 months I will never cancel this subscription unless something better comes along. It's way more accurate and way faster.
That's not my experience at all. I very seldom need to correct anything Copilot outputs.
>LLMs in programming absolutely have their uses
Absolutely. LLMs let you make more programming mistakes faster than any other invention with the possible exceptions of handguns and Tequila.
To be fair, it is also really good at spewing out industrial levels of boilerplate. As we all know, 99% of the effort in coding is the writing of code and the more boilerplate in your code base the better. /s
> If you’ve used CoPilot in VSCode, you understand the satisfaction of feeling like an LLM is thinking one step ahead of you
I did not get that feeling from CoPilot. I usually got the feeling that it was interrupting me to complete my thought but getting it wrong. It was incredibly annoying and distracting. Instead of helping me to think it was making it harder to think. Pair programming with an LLM has been great. Better than with most humans. But autocomplete sucks for me.
Seems like a reasonably-cromulent use-case -- or at least, it fits in with my own uses of LLMs.
I suck at spreadsheets. I know they can do both useful and amazing things, but my daily life does not revolve around spreadsheets and I simply do not understand most of the syntax and operations required to make even fairly basic things work. It requires a lot of time and effort for me to get simple things done with a spreadsheet on the rare occasion that I need to manipulate one.
There are things in life that I am very good at; spreadsheets are simply not amongst them.
But do I know what I want, and I generally even have a ballpark idea of what the results should look like, and how to calculate it by hand [horror]. I just don't always know how to articulate it in a way that LibreOffice or Google Sheets or whatever can understand.
LLMs have helped to bridge that gap for me, but it's a pain in the ass: I have to be very careful with the context that I give the LLM (because garbage in is garbage out).
But in the demo, the LLM has the context already. This skips a ton of preamble setup steps to get the LLM ready to provide potentially-useful work, and moves closer to just making a request and getting the desired output.
Having one unified interface saves even more steps.
(And no, this isn't for everyone.)
I don't think I understand that demo. It shows him using some built-in workflow thing (which isn't generally considered a core part of a spreadsheet) and then asks some LLM about the total price (I guess asking it to do math, which LLM's are notoriously bad at), but instead it looks like he gets some responses telling him what the term "total price" means, in prose that doesn't fit in the cells.
What was i supposed to take away from that demo?
The llm doesn't do the math. It outputs something the app then interrupted into a cell configuration with sums filled in. This is an area where llms can be quite good, you type out how you want to report the data like "give me subtotals of column F at every month of the date column E and a grand total of F at the bottom"
Except sometimes you can't seem to stop the prose.
Thank you. Tired of the usual jokers in threads like this. Right now the majority of comments are all sarcastic snark.
I'm new here; Hacker News is supposed to avoid the modern Reddit trap but feel it often falls into it. The topics are more relevant to me but the comments are often unbearably cynical and excessively dismissive
Yeah, I feel like there's a real culture problem on HN right now, especially for topics that have received any degree of hype (AI and crypto, mainly). People can be excessively rude for no reason if you express an outsider view. Gets to the point where I can't trust anyone here to engage with me in good faith (the exceptions are a welcome blessing).
I've come close to blocking the site on my network many times but it's an absolute goldmine of interesting info too... I'm not really sure if there's a solution, other than to practice emotionally disengaging from internet discussions.
We jokers are tired as well
If you’ve used CoPilot in VSCode, you understand the satisfaction of feeling like an LLM is thinking one step ahead of you.
Tried it once. Didn't get "satisfaction"; instead felt deeply irritated by the "backseat driver". Maybe it works better if you're just churning out mediocre boilerplate.
I’m churning out mediocre boilerplate here and it’s working great! Managing to build things crazy fast.
Like any tool, you need to learn how to use it and iterate with it. Trying it once is not enough.
Yeah, for me it feels, as a proposition, and having used it briefly before turning it off, like “what if you could pair program with an ultra-confident, yet dangerously incompetent, intern, forever”?
… with unlimited stamina, patience and capacity for negative feedback. If it was forever, you’d probably learn to take advantage of that resource!
> If you’ve used CoPilot in VSCode, you understand the satisfaction of feeling like an LLM is thinking one step ahead of you.
I’m not sure it’s so much ‘satisfaction’; it felt more like I was having a stroke until I turned it off. Its suggestions were, like, plausibly code, but completely contextually nonsensical in general; frankly IntelliJ’s old autocomplete-with-guessing functionality was better, as it at least _knows_ a certain amount about the codebase. Now, this was on a very large old codebase; no doubt it’s better if writing trivial new things.
The comments here are absolute existential crisis. "Only I do spreadsheets good!" I agree, this looks really neat.
It has some challenges ahead still:
https://i.redd.it/xr8uxqayv68d1.jpeg
For demos sure, but I'm not super hopeful on this frankly. LLMs are inherently about generating next char in sequential order. Nothing about real world spreadsheets is linear like that - they're all interlinked chaos.
As the comments correctly point out that image is like 10 years old and has nothing to do with LLMs.
> you understand the satisfaction of feeling like an LLM is thinking one step ahead of you
Yes, "satisfaction"
See also: https://matrices.app