alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans
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Hey HN, I’m Matt, the founder of Nobie. I started my career in banking and haven’t been able to shake the deep reverence I have for Excel. I grew up on it.
There are many good attempts to reinvent spreadsheets. We’re doing something different. We don’t want people to adopt a new language or move their work to another format. Instead, we want to improve how the Excel language is run and give people a choice of where to run it.
That’s what we’re building with Nobie: a second Excel-compatible runtime. It’s available as a native Mac app and as a CLI for macOS and Linux. The engine is written from first principles in Rust.
Nobie isn’t done. We are not at Excel parity today. Some features are missing.
We’re a team of four systems engineers. For the next eight weeks, all our work is going into closing those gaps.
Nobie is free and always will be for everything you can do in Excel.
Try it with a real workbook and tell us what breaks. The complicated and ugly ones are especially welcome.
Some features I think are pretty cool:
- We can render pixel perfect PNGs and PDFs (native vectorized PDFs)
- You can pass an xlsx, inputs, and output cells, and get a JSON API from any excel workbook
- You can pipe a postgres query into an xlsx file, and then run excel formulas over it
- You can pretty easily setup a `git diff` helper for xlsx files that shows you the changes you care about
- We have a built-in terminal, auto-launchers for Claude and Codex (with some fancy hooks that inject context when you send messages) and a pretty good MCP. After you install Nobie you're agents can do pretty much anything in an xlsx. We also provide a lot of tools that give agents high-signal information about the workbook, so they can quickly get up to speed and do good work
- You can programmatically edit workbooks in pleasant ways, and the workbook will update properly, AND recalc incrementally, AND the numbers will tie with Excel (if they don't definitely let us know, but we've put a huge amount of work into making sure they do)
- There's a bunch of examples on the CLI page on the website, but a lot of previously impossible/very hard things are now pretty trivial with our CLI, and I think this'll be really useful for for a lot of devs (the CLI will be getting better throughout this week, I have a lot more stuff I want to do with this)
- Happy to talk technical details. Everything is from scratch, and our render and calc engines have been a massive amount of work.
I'm one of the engineers on the team. We're really excited to be putting this out into the world. There's a massive amount of functionality in this thing that we're hoping will make the lives of everyone who needs to work with xlsx files better. Both programmatically and with a GUI.
See https://nobie.com/cli for the dev focused aspects, but I'm really proud of this thing, and happy that most people will be able to use it for free.
Happy to answer any questions people have.
This is definitely giving of vibes like what Deno/Bun are to Nodejs, Nobie is to Excel. I wish there was a Windows version. Hopefully, this gives the Excel team reason to compete and improve their product like what happened to Nodejs.
The copy here says that your data is Local-only and that it can interface with Claude, Codex, or Gemini... are you running these models locally, or am I missing something?
Very cool, well done. I’ll try it out! Is the calculation engine for the formulas tour custom, or is it built on top of eg Apache POI?
I'd love to have a way to make xlsx files be git-compatible, i.e. stored in plaintext.
I realise this may be out-of-scope as it's kind of baked into the file format, but does Nobie offer any functionality in that direction?
Tangential, but what's the art style of those images throughout the page? I really like them.
Very nice! Keen to try this out, been avoiding to add any MS to my new mac, and bumping into office files a few times a week sucks.
Maybe the title should mention MacOS not "agents and humans"?
Would love a good, modern Excel alternative. A few feature requests: - Ability to set european number style as standard - Ability to import/open csv
It’s honestly welcoming to simply see a modern Numbers alternative- I never liked how Numbers handles filters, sorting, and views all different… all agentic AI stuff sound like a bonus to me
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Is this manipulating excel files using agent AI? How is this different from using a python package like openpyxl and adding a UI layer on top with agentic co-editing?
https://github.com/rush86999/atom/blob/main/backend/core/off...