Terrifying that people are creating financial models with AI when they don’t have the skills to verify the model does what they expect

The argument seems to be that having a corporation restrict your ability to present arbitrary text directly to the model and only being able to go through their abstract interface which will integrate your text into theirs (hopefully) is more productive than fully controlling the input text to a model. I don't think that's true generally. I think it can be true when you're talking about non-technical users like the article is.

The copilot button in excel at my work can’t access the excel file of the window it’s in. As in “what’s in cell A1” and it says I can’t read this file. Not even sure what the point is then frankly.

I’m happily vibe coding at work but yeah article is right. MS has enterprise market share by default not by merit. Stunning contrast between what’s possible and what’s happening in big corp

I don't see a divergence, from what I can tell a lot of people have only just started using agents in the past 3-4 months when they got good enough that it was hard to say otherwise. Then there's stuff like MCP, which never seemed good and was entirely driven by people who talked more about it than used it. There also used to be stuff like langchain or vector databases that nobody talks about anymore, maybe they're still used but they're not trendy anymore.

It seems way too soon to really narrow down any kind of trends after a few months. Most people aren't breathlessly following the next twitter trend, give it at least a year. Nobody is really going to be left behind if they pick up agents now instead of 3 months ago.

The "upside" description:

  On the other you have a non-technical executive who's got his head round Claude Code and can run e.g. Python locally.

  I helped one recently almost one-shot converting a 30 sheet mind numbingly complicated Excel financial model to Python with Claude Code.

  Once the model is in Python, you effectively have a data science team in your pocket with Claude Code. You can easily run Monte Carlo simulations, pull external data sources as inputs, build web dashboards and have Claude Code work with you to really integrate weaknesses in your model (or business). It's a pretty magical experience watching someone realise they have so much power at their fingertips, without having to grind away for hours/days in Excel.

almost makes me physically sick.

I've a reasonably intense math background corrupted by application to geophysics and implementing real world numerical applications.

To be fair, this statement alone:

* 30 sheet mind numbingly complicated Excel financial model

makes my skin crawl and invokes a flight reflex.

Still, I'll concede that a Claude Code conversion to Python of a 30 sheet Excel financial model is unlikely to be significantly worse than the original.

> Microsoft itself is rolling out Claude Code to internal teams

Seems like Nadella is having his Baller moment

> I helped one recently almost one-shot[3] converting a 30 sheet mind numbingly complicated Excel financial model to Python with Claude Code.

I'm sure Claude Code will happily one-shot that conversion. It's also virtually guaranteed to have messed up vital parts of the original logic in the process.