Yes, unfortunately the free version of Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT coding models can't compare with the paid ones, and are just not that useful. But, there are alternatives like GLM and Grok that can be quite useful, depending on the task.
PS: The cheapest still very useful alternative I've found is GitHub's Copilot at €10/m base price, with multiple models included. If you pick manually between cheap models for low complexity and save Opus 4.6 for specific things, you can keep it under budget.
Same. And so do many people around me. And many still cling to their 12 minis.
Maybe that’s why Apple won’t make them anymore, people like us tend to keep them forever.
Seems like they have sort of a Notion-like approach to spreadsheets
I agree it's pretty cool. What I'd really love to see though is something like Jupyter Notebooks + Spreadsheets. If blocks of code and blocks of spreadsheets could talk to each other, it'd definitely be a killer feature for me
I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for, but Grist has relationship-driven spreadsheets where the formulas are all Python code. And you can have multiple tables show on the same page, where selection of one filters the others.
The tables are more database-style than pure unstructured Excel sheet style, but I've found that having a full Python environment in each cell to be pretty powerful, and I've started turning to it for analytical work because I can avoid the mess that larger Excel formulas can turn into.
No relationship except as a customer -- they're at getgrist.com
Ooh, excited to see mention of Grist (I am a cofounder). Python code and structured data are a great combination, and are particularly good for AI. We did an experiment where AI was quite impressive in writing Python formulas in Grist based on simple prompts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33809111
I suppose it's similar to rows.com's ASK_OPENAI("write a spreadsheet formula that..."). Most impressive is that it knows relationships between tables, and can construct correct lookup formulas, and do useful things with their results.
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