Hacker News

XLIDE: VBA without excel

51 points by sts153 ago | 16 comments

stymaar |next [-]

Very cool in theory. Unfortunately it's just 12klocs of a vibe-coded week-end project.

Edit: it's actually 50klocs since the pyOpenVBA dependency is from the same author and has been made the week-end before.

airstrike |root |parent |next [-]

Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

stymaar |root |parent |next [-]

> especially of other people's work.

Claude ain't “other people” so I don't think this applies.

By the way, the guidelines proscribe AI-generated comments, so I don't see why AI-generated posts should be treated differently.

airstrike |root |parent |next [-]

> Claude ain't “other people” so I don't think this applies.

Claude didn't make the post or come up with the idea or execute it independently, so not sure how that applies.

If you want to comment on the code quality or the engineering itself, that would be a good critical comment that teaches us something.

> By the way, the guidelines proscribe AI-generated comments, so I don't see why AI-generated posts should be treated differently.

That's your opinion and not the guideline, so again not sure how it applies.

You're free to e-mail hn@ycombinator.com and suggest, but I'm sure it crossed their mind when they wrote about AI comments so I don't think it's been decided that AI-aided projects are somehow automatically invalidated.

bitwize |root |parent |previous [-]

This is a nice demonstration of how AI enables people to build things that just wouldn't have existed before because the hassle was prohibitive. Negativity is still unwarranted here.

wiseowise |root |parent |previous [-]

When was this specific guideline written? In 2008? And dies it really apply when we’re talking about slop?

airstrike |root |parent [-]

When it was written has no bearing on its validity.

It applies when you're talking about someone else's work. Not every repo is slop. If you want to make a claim that this code is bad, then claim that rather than saying "they used AI therefore it's bad" which is, as the rule says, a shallow dismissal that teaches us nothing.

password4321 |root |parent |previous [-]

As long as no one is trying to hide anything, I won't complain. Working on VBA outside of Excel seems useful, especially if reliably integrated with source control.

Ultimately this project's success will be determined by its test suite... it's tough to get quality tests by vibe coding.

leshenka |next |previous [-]

Wonder how extensively VBA is used in today's Excel. I know that macros are considered dangerous but would love to know if there are exceptions for that rule.

On the other hand I wonder why aren't they run in such a sandbox where the most destructive action they can do is to wipe the sheets.

thewebguyd |root |parent |next [-]

> extensively VBA is used in today's Excel

Very.

Although I don't believe it's being used for greenfield hacks as much now, the world largely still runs on workbooks & apps built in Excel + VBA years and years ago. There are entire supply chains that likely run on this built by some analyst a decade or more ago. It remains by far the largest source of Shadow IT there is, and there isn't enough dev time or appetite to untangle these monstrosities into actual apps.

They aren't sandboxed because that would remove the usefulness. The reason VBA+Excel got its tentacles into everything is precisely because its not sandboxed. Anything the user can access is fair game, including network shares, SQL, and Win32 calls.

qsort |root |parent |next |previous [-]

I'm not at liberty to talk more about the details, but last year I worked on a project to modernize a process that critically relied on a VBA macro to handle billions (yes, with a B).

> they run in such a sandbox

What makes them interesting is that they can talk with the outside world: API calls, databases, the terminal named after a former Democratic primary candidate...

stymaar |root |parent |next |previous [-]

The world lives on Excel macros. The amount of “shadow it” where the business logic allowing big businesses to run is encoded is unfathomable.

aizk |root |parent |next |previous [-]

My first exposure to professional programming was writing VBA and SQL (yes, together) at a massive manufacturing facility that had really old equipment. Now with AI it's much easier to replace the code but VBA still has a stranglehold on legacy systems.

axus |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Probably more VBA used today from "yesterday's" Excel spreadsheets than new development. There's a reason Microsoft still produces 32-bit Office.

2Gkashmiri |root |parent |previous [-]

https://www.incometax.gov.in/iec/foportal/downloads/income-t...

You need a genuine licensed excel to run the file and prepare returns. Thankfully you can file same returns online on the portal for free so they get a safe pass that way.

_boffin_ |previous [-]

Gonna have some fun with this!