Blog.
Notes from the team on building an AI agent for spreadsheets — context management, agent tools, and why token efficiency matters.
The quarterly update test: 4 minutes vs 17
Most spreadsheet work isn't building a model — it's updating the one you already have. We rolled a real 663-formula model forward a quarter against a CLI coding agent on the same Claude model: 4 minutes vs 17, $2.34 vs $8.76, and a fidelity result worth seeing before you point a coding agent at a workbook you care about.
Read the post → August 4, 2026Claude vs ChatGPT for Excel: an honest comparison
Anthropic and OpenAI both shipped official Excel add-ins this year, eight weeks apart. What each one actually is, what the head-to-head tests found, what accountants and FP&A practitioners report — and the version wall both add-ins share that neither launch post mentions.
Read the post → August 4, 2026The London Whale and other great spreadsheet disasters
A $6.2 billion trading loss, a global austerity policy, a pandemic response, and the human genome — four disasters that ran through a spreadsheet, none caused by people who were bad at spreadsheets, and the one failure mode they all share.
Read the post → July 20, 2026Same model, same edit: benchmarking GridPath against a CLI coding agent
Five runs each, same Claude model. One harness was byte-clean every time; the other silently dropped file content every time — and our own audit deleted our best speed number along the way. Methodology, caveats, and the two commands to reproduce it.
Read the post → July 18, 2026Dead numbers: why AI pastes values into your spreadsheet
Ask an AI to extend your model and you'll usually get values, not formulas — numbers that look right and never update again. Why every AI tool defaults to this, what it costs you, and the ten-second test that catches it.
Read the post → July 10, 2026Free Excel alternatives: what they can and can't do
An honest look at the free and open-source options — LibreOffice Calc, Google Sheets, OnlyOffice, and engines like Univer. Where they genuinely win, and where Excel is still the king. Written from building GridPath on top of an open spreadsheet engine.
Read the post → July 4, 2026Why we built GridPath
General-purpose AI tools treat a workbook like a wall of text. We built GridPath around two ideas instead: you should control exactly what context the model sees, and the agent should have tools specialized for spreadsheet work. The result is more detailed, faster, and dramatically more token-efficient work.
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