I commend the fact they acknowledge the maintainer's work, but seeing the singular 'maintainer', I can't help but notice the weight on that one person's shoulders.
Naming things is hard for a reason. It shapes how we think and communicate. When I'm pointing an LLM at PostgreSQL internals vs. asking it to make a navbar prettier, I'm collaborating in fundamentally different ways. Having distinct terms helps us share ideas and set appropriate expectations.
We need a new term for LLMs actually solving a hard problems. When I help Claude Code solve a nasty bug it doesn’t feel like “vibing” as in “I tell the model what I want the website to look like”. It feels like sniping as in “I spot for Claude Code, telling how to adjust for wind, range, and elevation so it can hit my far away target”.
LLM-assisted Development. Something that for me works in practice, vibe-coding never did, you really need to carefully review and steer constantly if things are to work out longer than just a few features.
You’re right. It’s explicitly about not caring about the code:
> There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like "decrease the padding on the sidebar by half" because I'm too lazy to find it. I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.
So cool, I hope they pull it off. So many people use Excel. Although, I always thought the power of AI in Excel would come from the ability to use AI _as_ a formula. For example, =PROMPT("Classify user feedback as positive, neutral or negative", A1). This would enable normal people (non-programmers) to fire off thousands of prompts at once and automate workflows like programmers do (disclaimer: I am the author of Cellm that does exactly this). Combined with Excel's built-in functions for deterministic work, Claude could really kill the whole copy-pasting data in and out of chat windows for bulk-processing data.
Thanks, appreciate it. Indeed, and Anthropic did something similar for Google sheets a year ago. I am dying to know why they decided this should not be part of their excel effort. They obviously put a lot of work and thought into claude for excel so it must be intentional.
Anyone from Anthropic here that would like elaborate?
I can't wait until someone does this, then autofills 50k rows down, then gets a $50k bill for all the tokens.
Reminds me of when our CIO insisted on moving to the cloud (back when AWS was just getting started) and then was super pissed when he got a $60k bill because no one knew to shutdown their VMs when leaving for the day.
If someone is processing 50k rows, that means they found real value and the UX is working. That's the whole point.
Also, 50k rows wouldn't cost $50k. More like $100 with Sonnet 4.5 pricing and typical numbers of input/output tokens. Imagine the time needed to go through 50k rows manually and math doesn't really work for a horror story.
I'm continuing the work on Cellm, an Excel extension that let's you call LLMs in cell formulas like =PROMPT(A1, "Rate the sentiment of the customer feedback as positive, neutral, or negative"), and then drag the formula down to apply the same prompt to thousands of rows. I built it after my girlfriend had to manually classify 7,500 research papers. Cellm automates that kind of repetitive work.
Since we added MCP and the use of structured output to "spill" multiple return values into adjecent cells, it is the quickest way I know of to monitor competitors blogs everyday before my 09:00 meeting. And also the quickest way I know of to test new AI models. I have a sheet with SimpleQA, MMLUPro, or GPQA Diamond and testing a new model is a matter of adding a new column. The whole idea is to enable normal people (like, non-techies) to automate manual, repetitive tasks with AI like programmers routinely do.
Looks very similar yes, it is a great UI paradigm for running many prompts. I think of spreadsheets as the OG low-code tool and with just a sprinkle of LLMs, people can do so much more with tools they already know
Totally agree! And to be clear, I'm not intending to discourage you (or anyone else) from working on it. A bunch of smart people separately working and iterating to create the best version of spreadsheet + LLMs makes me a happy user
Okay, I'll bite. There are many clever people out there who figured out that spreadsheets is a great UI paradigm for building low-code AI workflows. That is good for users. And I find it is good for me. Thanks for validating the idea guys.
That’s pretty interesting. I’ve using Airtable’s “field agents” for a similar use case, but would love to use this instead. Does it automatically cache values? (Don’t want to pay for repeat prompts just because one input cell updated)
Yes it does, you can toggle it on and off. Send me an email at kasper at getcellm dot com or sign up to the waitlist on getcellm dot com and I will personally onboard you!
No not yet, we are about to onboard the first users on the waitlist one-by-one and when we have ironed out the major issues that we will inevitably discover, we will open up for paid users after that.
I wouldn’t worry too much about missing out, as you probably very well aware, whatever you choose to work on takes incredible amounts of time and energy to get off the ground. Now you just have more time to out into something else :)
Looks really cool, great job.