matthewgapp

Hey HN, I'm Matt, I founded Jog with Nathan. We spent 50K/month on CI at our last company. Agents are writing a ton of code and making the problem worse so we wanted to fix it from first principles. Jog runs on dedicated hardware - Zen 4/5 chips - in the US and EU. Happy to answer any questions.

join our cult, you will love it.

Yeah we think there is an opportunity to really open up the xlsx runtime. There are a lot of smart people in the world - and we're excited for them to build on top.

we have a CLI and we'll launch SDKs. Every aspect of Nobie will be scriptable. Love that your head is in the same place.

we've fixed a bunch of this which will be out in the next release.

it's a bit hidden and not fully featured. But we do support table references.

You can run cmd + T (or search for create table in the cmd +k menu) on a range to display the create table dialog.

windows is coming

yeah that’s how we think about it

desktop apps are so back

Also, we've designed the product so it costs us zero dollars to run :)

having zero marginal cost is nice and allows us to do things that others can't

agents do a lot better when they can "run" the excel workbook and understand the impact of inputs, and how pixels look when layering on things like conditional formats.

openpyxl is great at what it does, but it’s a file-format library rather than a workbook runtime.

It can insert columns, for example, but it doesn’t maintain dependencies such as formulas, tables, charts, or defined names when doing so. It also doesn’t evaluate formulas.

Nobie runs the workbook like Excel would: it evaluates formulas, maintains workbook semantics through edits, renders the result, and reads and writes the file.

Roughly speaking, Nobie is to an Excel workbook what V8 is to JavaScript. openpyxl is closer to a parser and serializer.

similar vibes, maybe less drama? lol

built from the ground up in rust, with the aim that it's much faster than Excel.

It supports all Excel formulas.

let us know your thoughts. we're shipping updates every day

glad you like em :) we're going for a gritty, off-world museum vibes. Generated with midjourney.

via the CLI, you could probz stream values and formatting out of the sheet, although we probably need to add a few things to ensure you can reach into every nook and cranny of the xlsx file.

We an example on our site of how you might use git & nobie together.

Fair question. The short version is: the desktop app and CLI are free and always will be; optional cloud & AI services will cost money.

Working w/ .xlsx files shouldn't cost money, and we think people should be able to use their own AI.

We expect to charge orgs/enterprises for a cloud product around governance, and for AI where/when it makes sense. We also plan to make some money when large companies use Nobie for training or to power their products.

Right now, though, we’re entirely focused on making the desktop app and CLI hands down the best xlsx experience in the world. The paid cloud product comes later.

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.

wow