72 karma · joined January 31, 2013
Just like CoPilot or Sourcegraph's Cody is used in VS Code, PySheets uses OpenAI to suggest the Python code to write when the sheet contains a Pandas data frame of a certain shape. The AI accelerates figuring out what APIs to call and when. I myself find Matplotlib and Pyplot highly confusing, and a coding assistant that writes my code in this niche, makes me a lot more productive. It is cool to say, "Take the dataframe in E13 and generate an orange bar graph for it," and see the code generated.
The AI is used to generate Python code, not to analyze or generate data in the sheet. I will clarify that on the landing page. Hopefully, that will inspire you to try it out.
This is a different Kurt Vile :-)
Alternatively, you could create a form to "upload" a specific file, but instead of uploading it, read the bytes from the PySheet's cell function.
PySheets currently runs inside the browser, on top of WebAsm, and the limitations there are bigger than just Python's slowness. You have only 4G addressable memory, including the interpreter and libraries. Network bandwidth is also a limiting factor for client-side computation.
That said, PySheets can render a sheet based on a 50,000-row Excel sheet in 0.5s and needs about 20s to do a full end-to-end recompute run. There are limits to what you can do in the browser without using an external kernel that can run Polars on large datasets. But, I think most people will be fine with what PySheets can let them do.
Finally, as the author of PySheets I am honored that a "competitor" sees us as a threat. I am quite impressed by Rowzero myself. Nice work :-)
That said, only the data stored in the sheet itself is stored in PySheets. Most use cases will load data from another place, filter and convert it, and then render a result. Still, self-hosting would be an interesting use case.