{"slug": "show-hn-visi-excel-as-a-cli", "title": "Show HN: Visi – Excel as a CLI", "summary": "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.", "body_md": "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?\n\nAfter 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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48436863)\n\nNote: the name \"visi\" is a nod to VisiCalc. It is also easy to type.\n\nComments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49929194](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49929194)\n\nPoints: 1\n\n# Comments: 0", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-visi-excel-as-a-cli", "canonical_source": "https://github.com/albert-yu/visi", "published_at": "2026-10-02 02:09:29+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-02 02:45:50.382437+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-tools", "developer-tools", "large-language-models"], "entities": ["Visi", "Excel", "VisiCalc", "Show HN", "Hacker News"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-visi-excel-as-a-cli", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-visi-excel-as-a-cli.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-visi-excel-as-a-cli.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-visi-excel-as-a-cli.jsonld"}}