Building @TracelightAI - https://xitter.cf/t.co/B9b9tqIPAa
London
Joined August 2021
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Introducing Tracelight 1.0
After six months, we are live with 5 of the 10 biggest management consultancies in the world, as well as PE funds and asset managers with over $600B in AUM.
Tracelight is the best AI add-in to Excel. In testing against the leading alternative add-ins, Tracelight 1.0 was:
- The most accurate
- 2x faster building analysis on average
- 20x faster at finding human errors in complex spreadsheets
We’ve been building with early adopters and enterprise partners for months. You can now reach a completely new level of performance in Excel. That’s why today we’re proud to launch a major new version.
To celebrate, we're giving 1 month of Tracelight Pro for free to anyone who comments LAUNCH below or TAGs a friend who needs this
In the last few weeks, Tracelight has become a software factory. It's been one of the most exciting moments in our careers.
My co-founder Aleks wrote about it below
Lime bikes are terrible
More than half of them are broken. The app freezes all the time and you have to restart.
I thought Uber was supposed to be good at this stuff? Voi is so much better
Quite funny watching rationalists fight with each other, clearly spitting with rage but still trying to appear rational, saying things like 'you have bad priors' when what they mean is 'shut up I hate you'
I think local AI is cool for consumers but a red herring in enterprise.
I see almost no reason for the unit of enterprise compute to be a PC.
Agents need their own machines.
I felt really sad when I read this.
Demis embodies so much that makes me proud to be British.
But it feels like he lost this game.
Maybe I'm overinterpreting. But :(
I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life, and as we enter this pivotal moment, I’m stepping into a new role as Chair of Google DeepMind & Chief Scientist of Alphabet. This will allow me to focus on long-term strategy, and accelerating scientific breakthroughs, including leaning into my work at Isomorphic to help cure disease.
I’m excited that @koraykv will be stepping up to lead GDM as SVP, alongside @joshwoodward and our exec team. I could not be more excited and confident about our amazing next chapter! 🚀
blog.google/company-news/ins…
Today, @TracelightAI is launching Spreadsheet Apps. For the first time, you can turn your Excel models into interactive, shareable apps that calculate live in the browser.
Your spreadsheet is no longer just a file. It’s the back-end of any app you want to build. Here’s just a few things that makes possible:
- Explore deals live: Toggle scenarios, adjust assumptions, and watch dashboards update instantly during meetings
- Build dynamic EBITDA bridges: Switch base periods and drill into different categories
- Animate cash flow: Use interactive Sankey diagrams to visualise exactly how cash flows through a business
- Generate interactive reports: Embed responsive, calculation-driven charts directly into your commentary
Your job is to create a story from complex data. Spreadsheet Apps are a new way to do that.
Try them today at tracelight[dot]ai
True also in spreadsheets
want to point out a few really interesting things here
1. Claude Code is actually the worst performing harness when using the same model, significantly behind opencode and cursor cli
this is the core reason i've been against the LLM companies focusing their business on locking people into their harness
what they are good at is making great models. they suck at making good harness products, just like how power plants won't make the best dishwashers, and how internet providers won't make the best phones
if anthropic wants to do what's best for their users, they should let people use their subscriptions in whatever harness they choose, not locked into claude code alone
2. fable 5 max is only 1pt above gpt 5.5 xhigh (77 vs 76)
this matches my experience so far - fable 5 does have the big model smell and it's pretty good, but it's not a massive jump forward like their marketing suggested, at least not on building software
this is actually alarming for anthropic because it's very unlikely people will want to pay 2x higher cost for the 1pt difference. my speculation would be that in enterprises people will be restricted to adopt fable & mythos only on some mission critical tasks, not used at scale
Lots of less intelligent things control more intelligent things:
My children control my behaviour because I love them
My DNA controls me by giving me the purpose to reproduce
Low iq celebs control me with dumb memes they put in my head
AI safety seems solvable to me
All your spreadsheets contain errors. Today, for a limited time, you can check your model with @TracelightAI for free. No add-in install required.
We’ve built a new error-checking engine for Tracelight. It's twice as accurate as Claude.
It's fully confidential - no spreadsheet data is retained. If you want to see where your errors are hiding, give it a go.
Try it out now at tracelight.ai/excel-audit
Incredible to watch everyone in the comments still failing Demis' test
“Hassabis administered a subtle test on him. The two men discussed the potential of AI, and Zuckerberg expressed appropriate excitement. But then, as the dinner continued, Hassabis brought up other hot technologies: virtual reality, augmented reality, 3-D printing. Zuckerberg sounded equally excited about all of them. ‘That told me what I needed to know,’ Hassabis said.”
In the seven days since @andrewchen predicted that spreadsheets are over because of no versioning or connection to code, we have released:
- spreadsheet versioning
- connections to code (web dashboards built off of spreadsheets)
Life comes at you fast
prediction re the end of spreadsheets
AI code gen means that anything that is currently modeled as a spreadsheet is better modeled in code. You get all the advantages of software - libraries, open source, AI, all the complexity and expressiveness.
think about what spreadsheets actually are: they're business logic that's trapped in a grid. Pricing models, financial forecasts, inventory trackers, marketing attribution - these are all fundamentally *programs* that we've been writing in the worst possible IDE. No version control, no testing, no modularity. Just a fragile web of cell references that breaks when someone inserts a row.
The only reason spreadsheets won is that the barrier to writing real software was too high. A finance analyst could learn =VLOOKUP in an afternoon but couldn't learn Python in a month. AI code gen flips that equation completely. Now the same analyst describes what they want in plain English, and gets a real application - with a database, a UI, error handling, the works. The marginal effort to go from "spreadsheet" to "software" just collapsed to near zero.
this is a massive unlock. There are ~1 billion spreadsheet users worldwide. Most of them are building janky software without realizing it. When even 10% of those use cases migrate to actual code, you get an explosion of new micro-applications that look nothing like traditional software. Internal tools that used to live in a shared Google Sheet now become real products. The "shadow IT" spreadsheet that runs half the company's operations finally gets proper infrastructure.
The interesting second-order effect: the spreadsheet was the great equalizer that let non-technical people build things. AI code gen is the *next* great equalizer, but the ceiling is 100x higher. We're about to see what happens when a billion knowledge workers can build real software.
From today, @TracelightAI turns your spreadsheets into beautiful, shareable webpages.
I’m so excited about this feature, it’s magic.
You could already create Powerpoints or Word docs with Tracelight.
But now you can build interactive webpages that tell the story of your analysis so much more powerfully.
It’s not just about saving time - although it definitely does that. It’s about differentiating yourself. Once your clients and team see dynamic artifacts like this, they won’t want to go back to the old way of doing things.
Over the next few days, we will be making Tracelight’s webpages even better - adding chat, and native citation to the underlying Excel.
Welcome to the future everyone 🙂
Someone changed a number in your model. Good luck finding it.
Today we're launching something to fix that - Spreadsheet Compare.
Drop two versions of the same spreadsheet into Tracelight's platform, and you get:
- A view of all the changes between the sheets: what cell values and formulas were before, what they are now, and any structural changes (new rows or columns)
- An AI summary of the differences
This solves so many problems for our users. To name just a few:
- Checking what changes your associate made to the model
- Figuring out the drivers of valuation changes between periods
- Making sure no one has made unauthorised changes
The more powerful AI gets, the more you’re going to need this. Model comparison and versioning is one of the key pieces of infrastructure that will allow us to hand off more modelling work to AI.
You can try it now on @TracelightAI's platform - link in the comments!
Peter Fuller retweeted
We’re excited to announce that @joinef has raised $200m of fresh capital, including $130m into our management company at a unicorn valuation, to be the natural home of the world’s most ambitious people in the Age of Entrepreneurship 🧵
Always been sceptical of the claim that 'with AI, the juniors aren't going to learn the mechanical basics of the job, so won't become good seniors'
Seems easy to build AI that teaches? And would be better than current training.
Cursor could have 'learning mode' etc