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.

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 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 Comments: 0