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Show HN: Visi – Excel as a CLI

A developer released Visi, an open-source command-line spreadsheet engine built with LLMs and fuzzing that aims for near-100% Excel compatibility, according to a Show HN post. After a couple of months of work, recent fuzzing runs found no discrepancies with Excel, though the developer says a long tail of edge cases likely remains. The tool has been used for casual agentic tasks such as modeling credit card annual-fee break-even points and running DCF models, with results viewed through an OOXML viewer.

read1 min views2 publishedOct 2, 2026

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.

Comments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49929194](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49929194)

Points: 1
source & further reading
github.com — original article Better Call GPT – Plugin for Talking to Claude Code in Live Braxis: Auto-generate and track AI agent readiness (0-100 score and history) Show HN: Simply @dotlink in ChatGPT web,space or dot to access local files,tools
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