Show HN: Visi – Excel as a CLI (github.com)

1 points by albert-yu 10h ago ↗ HN

This project doesn't solve a burning problem for me, but it's more of a curiosity-driven experiment asking one question: with LLMs and fuzzing, how close can I get to a 100% Excel-compatible spreadsheet engine?

After working on this for a couple of months, it seems to be pretty close now (and in some cases, more accurate than Excel). Recent fuzzing runs have been unable to find discrepancies with Excel, but I think that there is still a long tail of cases out there. Nonetheless, visi has worked well so far for casual agentic use cases, e.g. modeling the minimum spend to break even on a credit card annual fee/running a DCF model for a company. To view the resulting workbook, I've been using this OOXML viewer (HN link): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48436863

Note: the name "visi" is a nod to VisiCalc. It is also easy to type.

2 comments

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sightspinner 9h ago ↗

Do I understand correctly that this is allowing you (or an LLM) to evaluate (i.e. 'run') excel expressions to get the actual realized values from the spreadheet from the command line? Or is this doing something else?

Actually this seems super useful. I'm surprised this doesn't already exist.