Show HN: Pane – An agent that edits spreadsheets

[rbajp]

Hi HN,

I built Pane, a spreadsheet-native agent that operates directly on the grid (cells, formulas, references, ranges) instead of treating spreadsheets as text.

Most spreadsheet AI tools fail because they: - hallucinate formulas - lose context across edits - can't reliably modify existing models

Pane runs inside the spreadsheet environment and uses the same primitives a human would: selecting cells, editing formulas, inserting ranges, reconciling tables.

I launched it on Product Hunt this weekend and it unexpectedly resonated, which made me curious whether this approach actually holds up under scrutiny.

I'd love feedback on: - obvious failure modes you expect - whether this is fundamentally better than scripts + formulas + copilots

Happy to answer technical questions.

[mattmm11]

Yesterday I was trying to have Gemini help put together a toy model to calculate some financial scenarios in Sheets, and it struggled mightily. The biggest challenge was it didn't have a good way to port formulas over into specific cells, so I basically had a CSV and a bullet list of formulas to put in by hand. From the demo I couldn't tell how well this use case would be handled, but I imagine better in what you've built (will try it out to test it!). I did not try Gemini in sheets, for the record, which may work better than from the chat environment.

I'd echo other comments on the demo being a bit hard to follow, and it'd be useful to be able to demo without having to create an account/sign up, encouraging exploration.

[rubenflamshep]

I fell out of the funnel during the demo. Not sure if there was a browser issue but the video had no sound and watching spreadsheet navigation with no context left me completely lost as to what was happening.

[rbajp]

Super valuable feedback. Thank you! Will work on improving the demo.

[ashwindharne]

I'm building something similar, but as an Excel add-in instead of a standalone product.

In real use-cases, it seems that by far the hardest part is figuring out the right representation for a spreadsheet workbook and the right primitives for the agent to be able to navigate it adeptly and cost-effectively; structure is incredibly variable and the data just compresses rather poorly (values, formulas, formatting, charts, pivots, etc.).

Great stuff though, think we'll see a lot of movement in the space in the coming years!

[rbajp]

Agreed, there’s a few neat tricks that can get performance to increase significantly

[smallerfish]

What's your experience with the competition? I have never tried gemini in sheets, but don't you think google will get there soon if they're not already?

[subpixel]

Gemini in sheets is not that hot yet, but I think it's got hancuffs on to prevent people destroying their valuable work product.

But if I ask Gemini to build be formulas and than just paste them into Google Sheets the results are pretty darn good.

[SkyPuncher]

How do you handle documents with Macros?

[rbajp]

Not implemented yet - they should be imported but will not be executed.

[tjchear]

iirc there was a startup doing the same thing called sourcetable? How does pane compare to it?