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gosen 2 days ago [-]
When Anthropic released "claude design" people were telling that figma is dead now, but in fact claude design didn't move forward and stayed as a "fallback tool" when you quickly need to check / edit something. And for the serious work you still go to Figma and other designer tools.
I have a feeling that Whiteboards, Sheets, Docs and so on will be the same - it's a nicer way to present artefacts, discuss them and maybe make notes, but for the proper editor experience you'll go to the tools which were designed for these things. And I'm not saying that Claude Something tools are bad, they're just overly simplified and limited, probably on purpose.
powerapple 2 days ago [-]
Although you are not switching from Claude Design to Figma, it will limit Figma's future. I am not a designer, previously I have downloaded Figma and used it along with other tools. I am not going to open Figma again. As you said, Claude Design is overly simplied, and that's why new users will go to Claude Design, the fennel going to Figma is gone I think, and Claude Design will continue to improve. These AI platforms are like Operating Systems in OS war, or browsers in browser war, it is the app/platform people are going to have by default, and they are going to keep many of them inside their eco system. IMO, for short term, you are right, if we are speaking about long term, professional softwares are going to suffer a lot.
nozzlegear 1 days ago [-]
> I am not a designer, previously I have downloaded Figma and used it along with other tools. I am not going to open Figma again.
Were you a paying Figma user before, or using the free tier?
harperlee 1 days ago [-]
Keyword is “funnel”: a number of those that are familiarized with figma would convert, even if years afterwards. So your question of whether the parent paid already is besides the point.
benterix 1 days ago [-]
Not entirely. In the past they would go from free to paid Figma account when in need of more professional approach. Now they can't unlock Claude Whiteboards become a professional tool, so they still need to migrate to Figme when their needs cross a certain threshold.
lucideer 2 days ago [-]
You're right but I do feel like this is more of a case of different paradigms being a slow burn rather than a failure.
I don't see people switching to Claude sheets overnight & the messaging from anthropic will likely become less effusive over time (short-/medium-term). But I'd be surprised if this doesn't make significant inroads in the long-term.
remus 2 days ago [-]
It feels like claude sheets is to google sheets what google sheets is to excel. Google sheets kind of removes the whole idea of having to email copies of files around by letting people collaborate on a single doc. Claude sheets seems aimed at using agents as the primary way of interacting with a sheet.
You'd think google would be able to catch up here because they have all the pieces, but then maybe they're too locked in by virtue of having a large existing user base so they can't make the same radical UX changes that anthropic can.
lucideer 2 days ago [-]
one of the biggest issues with Microsoft & Google's forays into AI is that they have such broad existing product-bases. Anthropic & OpenAI don't have to worry about migration, differentiation of their product portfolio, brand confusion (see e.g. Google Buzz/Talk/Meet/Chat debacles), etc. They're operating greenfield with pure user-acquisition focus - things are much messier for Google/MS.
qlte 1 days ago [-]
OpenAI seems like they've released (and deprecated) about as many "app store for ChatGPT" products as Google has Chat apps in 1/10 of the time.
djhn 1 days ago [-]
I was surprised to see a ”drag to fill with AI” handle in the middle of my google sheet recently.
It was so understated and unobtrusive compared to all the other hamfisted, oversold AI features everywhere.
I was even more shocked when it kind of did what I was going to do in those cells. And just like most spreadsheets, this was an abomination of a ”spreadsheet”; more of a two dimensional scratch pad for loosely organised text.
gosen 2 days ago [-]
I agree, these new products (the same as claude design) is a base on which they'll be probably building new experiences and use cases, so long-term it will get much more integrated into daily live, especially for quick and easy tasks
dogscatstrees 2 days ago [-]
I'm really happy with what Claude can do with Reladraw. No longer are objects colliding on the drawing (see Mermaid, draw.io). The artifacts that Claude can create off of "lighter" tools will make me go there 80% of the time, Figma and other "heavies" can stay in the 20%. More like 90/10 actually.
arcanemachiner 2 days ago [-]
> objects colliding on the drawing
I don't quite follow you. Are you talking about Mermaid's lack of decision when laying out diagrams?
I'm working on a tool that makes it easier for me to work with mermaid diagrams (mermaid is a great intermediary format for representing certain types of information, e.g. software architecure, but its syntax does not work well with my brain), so I'm interested in alternative concepts that make it easier to work with these types of things.
dogscatstrees 2 days ago [-]
Mermaid is an automatic layout tool. Reladraw has language where instead of letting an algorithm completely randomize your layout, you declare where items go using relative terms, such as below, right of, level with, or gaps (relative placement). The natural language is good for the LLM.
saithound 2 days ago [-]
For what it's worth, in my bubble, the predictions about the end of Figma were entirely correct.
tyre 2 days ago [-]
Claude design was good and it only gets better at design. For solo projects, it’s much better. They’re moving it from standalone to being fully integrated.
Figma is the default for teams but is losing a lot of stickiness.
gosen 2 days ago [-]
I agree on solo projects, I actually use claude design as a viewer to see what my agents built or for quick and dirty prototypes, the design work itself happens in claude code. So to me "claude design" as a product doesn't really click, although I agree it's useful for many many people. In my case I'm just not an experience designer to learn Figma from scratch so claude design covers that part, but I saw how cool UX designers were still choosing Figma
chrisweekly 1 days ago [-]
YMMV. IME Claude Design has horrible UX.
zobzu 2 days ago [-]
I think its shortsighted tbh.
The advances are crazy. One will just release another claude design later and before you know it, it'll just be super figma.
What these tools are generally missing is a way for the user to "fix stuff" that isnt just prompting. Once they add things like that, added to model improvements... it's just going to be a cost story: which one is cheaper.
jmathai 2 days ago [-]
For my latest app, I didn’t use any analytics software or package. Instead, I had the app save events as jsonl files on the server. I used Claude artifacts to create a custom report from that data. That was just a python file which now sits on a server next to those data files, giving me a live dashboard of very customized insights.
I don’t see myself ever using an off-the-shelf analytics package again.
lifeisloving 2 days ago [-]
You realize the hallucination rates are still circa 2-10%. So 1/10 times you're getting straight up incorrect reports..
maest 2 days ago [-]
The report is generated by a python script
jgalt212 2 days ago [-]
Don't do that. You'll use too few tokens if your script is reusable.
matkoniecz 2 days ago [-]
What is source of this claim?
(observed error rate for me is much much much lower than 1/10)
ryan_n 1 days ago [-]
Even the not-frontier models are not hallucinating 1 out of every 10 times. Insane claim with zero data to back it up.
eVeechu7 1 days ago [-]
It was a hallucination.
seanhunter 2 days ago [-]
You realise 100% of statistics in your post are anachronistic or made up?
nitroedge 2 days ago [-]
Still? Or are you quoting 2023 stats?
You mean Claude is incorrect once every ten times I ask it something?
lifeisloving 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
newswasboring 2 days ago [-]
How are we measuring this? Is there a report on this by someone other than Anthropic?
lifeisloving 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
newswasboring 1 days ago [-]
Or you can actually provide a source for your claims.
brookst 1 days ago [-]
You’re going to need to source that risible claim.
mizzao 1 days ago [-]
We've almost completely replaced Figma with Claude Design as a team-wide workflow. We only go to Figma now when we need to hand-tweak something which is becoming increasingly rare.
sfeng 2 days ago [-]
One thing I have to appreciate is that Claude is also capable of driving tools like blender directly in the background. For me, what that means is there’s almost never a reason to open a professional design package anymore. Similarly, if I need to share something, I just have Claude make a quick interactive website for it. So while Claude Design itself did not reduce the need for Figma, AI is reducing the need for these tools in general.
nunez 2 days ago [-]
I think Ant and OpenAI are doing the same thing that AWS does in that they launch stuff they've built for customers or internal use.
OpenAI did something similar with Sales Assistant last year. Haven't heard of anyone using it.
square_usual 1 days ago [-]
For one, I don't think it's true that Claude Design didn't move forward. They've pulled a lot of primitives from it (e.g. design systems) into their docs/artifacts/data product, so you can have consistent design across all of your assets. I'm a big user of that for making quick, internal presentations that look like company assets but aren't cookie cutter slide templates.
Second, Claude Design doesn't need to move forward, it just works and is perfectly usable. I don't know what I'd want from it - it's not meant for you to "manually" move things around anyway, you just talk to the agent. And I've designed more than a few things on Design.
JamesSwift 2 days ago [-]
Claude Design is a great idea but a terrible product. Claude Design may not kill figma but "something like claude design" probably will.
fny 2 days ago [-]
This is very much how people felt about Google Docs when it was first released.
History is repeating itself AI natively.
adam-eclse 2 days ago [-]
Once you understand how far you can push it, Claude Design is an incredible tool - my personal favorite ai-related thing of the year. Of course it's piggybacking off all the model advancements which has made it increasingly capable.
nhod 2 days ago [-]
For the vast majority of users, Claude Design is game-changing. I used to pay designers tons of money to create brand style guides, which other humans then had to attempt to use to create on-brand anything (social media posts, printed documents, posters, websites, ads, whatever) for the business. They would almost always not know such a style guide existed, ignore it, or fail because they just didn't have the skills.
Claude Design almost completely solves that. One dedicated designer can make a Claude Design System and then everything it makes from there stays on brand with essentially zero effort. And it is super intuitive to get to a usable Design System. Every time I use it I think "This is how AI is supposed to feel."
v9v 2 days ago [-]
How did you get it to produce outputs that aren't obviously AI? I tried multiple times to get it to stop putting subheadings under every header in monospace fonts, but even when I explicitly asked it not to and even when the design style never featured such elements it kept putting them in.
prash20026 2 days ago [-]
Two ways that have worked for me YMMV
1. Have one agent build it and then another check(Usually the agent that checks is a bigger model or with more effort)
2. Make it deterministic, make sure you have a list of accepted fonts based on your brand guidelines. Have claude create a script that checks what fonts are used and if they follow the list, if not send it back to be redone, similar thing can be done to check things like header followed by a subheader(I usually have it create designs in html so it is a simple check of is there a h3 following say a h2)
jstummbillig 2 days ago [-]
> When Anthropic released "claude design" people were telling that figma is dead now, but in fact claude design didn't move forward and stayed as a "fallback tool" when you quickly need to check / edit something.
I don't think there is a reasonable expectation that these new tools will simply end Google Workspace. Google are going to be just fine to do whatever they want with their stuff, and they have the customers.
Anthropic can just do this for a new generation of people and businesses, and establish themselves here over time.
2 days ago [-]
ftchd 2 days ago [-]
I wouldn't take any "X is dead" as more than just momentarily hype, we should get used to it now that it's been happening for years.
For me, this is simply a first-party UI for Claude. So they have better control over the presentation layer + some extra features on top.
It's not meant to be equivalent to Google Sheets or Excel.
boredtofears 2 days ago [-]
For us, Claude design has been "good enough" and we stay in the design phase much less long in general. There's no need to get a polished design, just get it into code once you've decided the major UI decisions and iterate there.
tomjen3 2 days ago [-]
Figma is trading lower now than it did when Claude Design was released with a total stock drop of 56.38% from Nov 10, 2025 to Nov 10, 2026.
So yes, not dead and clearly good for people who want that additional layer of control, but also nowhere where it used to be.
andersonpico 2 days ago [-]
> also nowhere where it used to be
is this about growth, the userbase or the product? userbase is growing and the product seems to work fine; as for growth I'm not sure that was what people talked about when they said Figma would *die* but even then 43% seems fine?
Rapzid 1 days ago [-]
Not sure what people are smoking; figma is seeing huge growth.
Figma also has MCP and other AI features. You can use it in agentic workflows just fine!
It's also not Anthropic only. Or OpenAI only. Businesses are leaning heavily into model and harness diversity, particularly open and bespoke variants..
mchusma 2 days ago [-]
We stopped using figma. Basically they just merged design into artifacts (they have a few rough edges to work out with transition but honestly it makes sense to me after a while).
ripvanwinkle 2 days ago [-]
this is how Google docs, sheets and slides felt in comparison to MS Office when they first came out.
Initially they were adopted by customers with the simplest use cases and the products grew over time to what they are.
The next set of startups might just have a Claude sub when they are small and grow with the product
domelian 2 days ago [-]
True, but still waiting for Figma stock recovery :(
gosen 2 days ago [-]
I thought Figma would recover once they finally do something with Payload CMS since they acquired them long time ago. And only now I found that they did (https://www.figma.com/blog/websites-with-payload-in-figma/) and it doesn't look good :/ I was expecting much more
drewbeck 1 days ago [-]
I’m not too familiar with Payload — what were you hoping for?
nozzlegear 1 days ago [-]
People reading this comment and the replies to it should keep in mind that, by the mere fact of being on HN, users are already heavily skewed toward being in Anthropic's target audience. There's a lot of "well actually Figma is dead for me/at my company/in my bubble" replies, but that's kind of expected (using Anthropic/AI products) when you're the type of person who posts on HN.
te_chris 2 days ago [-]
What are you talking about? Claude Design is incredible and we’ve canceled figma
gosen 2 days ago [-]
are you a designer or you use it as part of other job (engineering, management, etc.)?
nullsanity 2 days ago [-]
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option_greek 2 days ago [-]
Model companies are starting to cannibalize their api customers's business cases. Shows that the regular avenues of revenue growth are slowing down
jakevoytko 2 days ago [-]
It just shows that they hired a lot of productive people and gave them a lot of autonomy. Google went through a protracted period of this, culminating in the "more wood behind fewer arrows" mandate in 2011 where they decided to shutter stagnating, abandoned, or distraction efforts.
I expect that Anthropic will have success in some of their side hustles if they're reinforced by the model ecosystem and double down on them, but you should also expect that at some point in the future we will talk about the "Anthropic Graveyard".
sumedh 2 days ago [-]
When ANT starts building 10 chat Apps that is the signal that they dont know what they are doing.
NickNaraghi 2 days ago [-]
Vertical integration was always in the cards, unfortunately.
Whiteboarding is the main thing I do in my AI build processes outside of Claude - if they can do it native + multiplayer, it's going to be a huge UX improvement for a lot of users.
iliedanila 2 days ago [-]
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pravinp 1 days ago [-]
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tyre 2 days ago [-]
> Shows that the regular avenues of revenue growth are slowing down
Why does it show that? Maybe they have tens of billions of dollars and the bandwidth to do more.
jrflo 2 days ago [-]
The revenue growth dropped from 100+% QoQ to only 60% QoQ, they're dying! /s
ajmurmann 22 hours ago [-]
This creates lock in. LLMs are a commodity and they need lock in
ActionHank 2 days ago [-]
Which will cause customers to leave. Good thing I just bought a fresh batch of popcorn from Costco.
Ancalagon 2 days ago [-]
Which will cause their customers to leave back to Claude.
bertt 2 days ago [-]
> Working with Claude on a project often meant moving the output over to another tool or program, where Claude didn’t have live access to follow progress and changes. Now, your documents, boards, sheets, and dashboards can stay in Claude, with access for your team to continue editing together.
I read this as: We'll build anything and everything into Claude eventually.
How does this work long-term? Is the new reality going to be picking an AI provider for all of your SaSS tooling, similar to Cloud providers for infra? Hopefully competition thrives.
NichoPaolucci 2 days ago [-]
That's the goal. They're desperately trying to make their platform 'sticky'. I see OpenAI using similar tactics with Spaces and Dots.
Dots in particular display some insidious methodology, they've hidden the "programmable" portions of an agent. They want to make it 'magic' (all your work goes through a single tool) but... that's pretty much exactly what businesses DON'T want. We need to see what it's doing, accessing, working with, underlying data, etc... It's an explicit business requirement for us.
The more they can 'hide' what the backend does, the harder it is to get away from the product.
Buuuuut, I don't think it's going to work. I can still export it somehow if I want to, and it would probably take 10-15 minutes... The whole point of these agents is that they're 'plug and play' with whatever technology you want.
And if they don't build them this way, someone will whip up an open source version that does it cheaper and more transparently in a couple of weeks.
Software being free now hits both of these companies exactly where they want protection.
cruffle_duffle 2 days ago [-]
> We need to see what it's doing, accessing, working with, underlying data, etc... It's an explicit business requirement for us.
this is my biggest gripe with dot. it doesn't integrate very well with my "agent ecosystem". It doesn't see my boxen. It doesn't load any agents.md. It like... is on an island and the only way it talks to the world is.... opaque magic.
shostack 2 days ago [-]
You are not the target audience for it.
eeiekeww 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
SoftTalker 2 days ago [-]
> I read this as: We'll build anything and everything into Claude eventually.
Well, isn't that the natural end result of an AGI?
No more software, no more deciding what apps you need. It's all just Claude. Except now you're pulling 10kW to add up a column of numbers.
drewbeck 1 days ago [-]
> How does this work long-term? Is the new reality going to be picking an AI provider for all of your SaSS tooling
I see them — and others, across model providers, startups and legacy companies — as rapidly exploring the problem and solution spaces. By building agentic features into familiar tools you give people what they need to explore and build new paradigms and approaches. Maybe white board + design tool is a killer app that truly takes Figma’s place, or spreadsheet + apps built in house or or or.
At this point having a clear vision of the future is a liability because you’re probably wrong.
Better to build existing tools with agents built in and let your users discover the killer use cases.
United857 2 days ago [-]
Wasn’t this the point of MCP (also invented by Anthropic) to establish interop for tool use?
nitroedge 2 days ago [-]
No need for MCP in the future if Claude does everything is their bet.
lp92 2 days ago [-]
The playbook Anthropic is following with integrating everything innto their platform is the same playbook that enabled Microsoft, Google, Baidu, Amazon, Apple, etc al to get and stay where they are.
ericmay 2 days ago [-]
Competition will thrive as it always does, wouldn’t worry about that. In this case I view Claude as more of the competitor here. Ever try using Co-pilot in Microsoft Office?
“Please remove this page break I can’t figure out how to get rid of and someone else added”
Co-pilot: “Sorry I’m unable to do that but you can follows these same instructions you can find on the Internet to accomplish that”.
Claude: “I will literally rebuild Word from the ground up to solve this problem if that’s what it takes (but here is how to actually solve your problem), oh and do you want this exported in the best format for this software, this other software, or in these 15 file formats? Oh I don’t have native capabilities for that format - ok let’s build a script and convert….”
You get the picture. Competition is here, and it will get even better. Many SaaS companies will die. Good. Many of them only delivered short-term value solving artificial constrains or gaps in software.
wolfinterval 1 days ago [-]
The best thing Co-Pilot told me was something like "If Claude did what you say it did and I made what I made, I would use Claude too"
torben-friis 2 days ago [-]
>How does this work long-term? Is the new reality going to be picking an AI provider for all of your SaSS tooling,
I suspect the goal is partly starting a walled garden.
"Llms are interchangeable? Our harness/toolset isn't".
It's a way to get a moat I guess.
It doesn't sound like a business for the scale they're aiming for though. Taking a bite of the MS office's pie doesn't seem to me like a trillion dollar company move.
mattbrewsbytes 2 days ago [-]
> We'll build anything and everything into Claude eventually.
I think thats more like: "We'll build anything and everything into Claude eventually with the statistical median level of vibe-coded features."
That might work for some use cases but I doubt serious Excel nerds are going to drop it because Claude has a spreadsheet like tool.
duskdozer 1 days ago [-]
The Excel nerds will drop it if their managers decide that Claude Spreadsheet is just as good, better even, with AI, and force them to
ActionHank 2 days ago [-]
Claude becomes a no-code platform with all the same shortcomings they have.
The rest of the world moves on using LLMs as tools.
Anthropic is eventually bought and stripped for parts.
jrflo 2 days ago [-]
I mean, I don't think it's that different from the current reality of businesses just picking Microsoft or Google as their one-stop-shop for business software. There will actually be more competition now, as Anthropic and OpenAI will be added to the mix.
FailMore 2 days ago [-]
I have a different approach to the industry when it comes to work documents.
I'm building https://smalldocs.org / https://github.com/espressoplease/smalldocs. My take is that the siloed approach of previous document formats is now redundant. The document formats were isolated because we needed heavy tools for humans to do the work. Now we need lightweight javascript predominately for rending as agents do the work, so document formats can be blended.
This means SmallDocs allows an agent to put together a document (the underlying format is markdown with rich custom rendering on top) with text, diagrams, a multi tab spreadsheet, charts, code, slides, etc.
TLDR: if you want to share this project, fix it's README.
I like the idea but failed to grasp how it works and more importantly how to use it and why it could be useful. Many sentences sound just like what my LLM produces when writing READMEs.
I'm not anti-AI for coding but README is one of the few left remaining places where LLMs suck, no matter which model/harness/instructions I use, it's always gibberish. Someone needs to review it line by line if it needs to be human readable. Especially for this kind of project which is not straightforward.
TobTobXX 2 days ago [-]
Export -> PDF
I get white-on-white text and paragraphs that have one word on the next page.
I guess WYSIWYG paper-oriented document editors are still relevant.
FailMore 2 days ago [-]
Thanks for the note, not something I've worked on for a while but will improve it.
2001zhaozhao 2 days ago [-]
Congratulations you just invented Github Flavored Markdown or, like, Excel 1998 spreadsheet embed inside Word 1998
If you can have any app at the snap of your fingers, you will have them all
I really don't understand why people can't see the future, in ten years the speed at which AI will create apps will be astonishing. Any app, ask and get it done instantly. So if one provider (your AI provider) has them all why would you go around looking for the same thing if you already have them in one place?
I use DeepSeek because Claude never allowed me to play with it (living in Venezuela), but I know people that started with Claude just use it everyday and by inertia they won't switch, no reason at all. Just ask Claude for anything and it will deliver. Same for any AI. Retention is the key word, tools, apps, services, plugins, libraries, all in one place, everything.
AI is the new OS, the new browser, the new marketplace
bombcar 1 days ago [-]
The key is people DON'T ask Claude to make an app to do X, they just ask Claude to do X.
The latter is the key to Anthropic's IPO price. Why spend the time building tooling to do a thing when you can just ask the magic robot to do the thing, each time?
nautilus12 1 days ago [-]
To avoid having to pay the magic robot to do the thing over and over again. Why rent movies when you can buy them?
rcxdude 14 hours ago [-]
People are often shockingly unaware of what their usage costs. It's a fairly common pattern for nontechnical users to have huge long-running sessions which they periodically give easily automatable tasks to. The most expensive users are often also getting the least value out of the LLM.
bombcar 1 days ago [-]
Insert dvd sales vs netflix chart here.
ryan_n 1 days ago [-]
> I really don't understand why people can't see the future, in ten years the speed at which AI will create apps will be astonishing.
Why do you assume people don't understand this? I think most people, especially those on HN are painfully aware of this.
HFguy 1 days ago [-]
I generally agree.
At least now, it depends on availability of requirements. If someone asks for a notepad app, AI has a ton of information available to go off of.
If you are asking for an app that is some esoteric pile of business logic, not sure how app would know what to build.
FlamingMoe 1 days ago [-]
"the speed at which AI will create apps will be astonishing"
... it's already astonishing and nearly instant.
1 days ago [-]
thewhitetulip 1 days ago [-]
I tried making an Obsidian clone in Rust using claude code... It did not go well. I suppose it doesn't have any well designed note taking apps in the training set
OlaProis 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
ddaletski 2 days ago [-]
There is a big problem with how we work with ai-generated artifacts, but I don't think creating another google-docs-like suite is the answer.
LLMs are very good at working with Markdown, and are way worse with xml-based rich documents. The problem is, we have established collaborative rich docs, but no collaborative markdown-based docs.
For example at google, all your system design docs will end up being written in google docs, because it can be easily shared with granular access, people can leave comments, it's well integrated with other google products. But once your doc is in that complicated format, there's no way to iterate on that with an agent: it's gonna inevitably destroy your formating, overwrite some of your edited content, and you can't even have a nice line by line diff like you'd have when you work with a simple text format like md.
Building a nice collaborative markdown editor to the level where it competes with gdoc in popularity, at least in software engineering circle, would be the answer.
Same with sheets. Some stripped version, which is as close as just "csv editor with some better visuals" would be much more ai-friendly
elemur 2 days ago [-]
Totally agree. I created Markdown Logic (app.markdownlogic.com) because of this.. team edit, git sync, ai and api and cli support, but all based around markdown.
One interesting case I worked on though was structured content (sbom, api, etc..) content into markdown as well so you could have a readable and understandable repository or project.
It’s pretty amazing what you can do with a CI/CD integrated cli tool or AI agent sharing content with people, back and forth.
orbis-tertius 2 days ago [-]
Agree, I wonder if this is just a case of trying to meet white collar workers where they are? I guess most non-technical white collars are familiar with sheets, docs etc and prefer sticking with it
danieldeng2 2 days ago [-]
> Building a nice collaborative markdown editor to the level where it competes with gdoc in popularity
Take a look at https://marble.md/ if you're interested. It's a nice markdown editor with all the collaboration features from GDocs
mmcconnell1618 2 days ago [-]
Apple created IWork: Pages, Numbers, Keynote. Google created Workspaces with Docs, Sheets, Slides. Open source options like LibreOffice and OpenOffice exist. Google is the only one that has managed to take any significant market share from Microsoft. I don't think Anthropic has the focus to follow it through.
eastbound 2 days ago [-]
Apple has wrecked its suite this year: In every possible way, you are redirected to their subscription-based AI library of components (Apple Content). Want to add a square in Keynote? Use our AI library!
All the buttons of the UI: Gone! Replaced by a single button: Apple Content.
I was an absolute fan of Apple Keynote, been spreading it to my employees for 15 years, it was bare-bones, straightforward, uncluttered and direct; I just struggle do SIMPLE things in it now!
qwerty_clicks 1 days ago [-]
Although Claude could build your anything-app or host your design, Anthropic must solve some trust problems. Ppl still use alternative software because running a business or permanently hosting your backlog on an artifact that someone one-shot prompt build in 20 mins is scary. Do you trust that this artifact link will be stable and reliable for an IRS audit or could a disgruntled employee edit it to hurt the company? What was in their claude.md when they built it?
AntonJidkov 2 days ago [-]
Smart move for Anthropic. They've embedded into businesses and are now aiming at being the Google Workspace equivalent.
Next step, domains and email?
Also this differs from Claude design imo - which was too token heavy and not easy enough for a human to manipulate without prompting.
Here, the human and agent user have a similar level of control.
1broseidon 2 days ago [-]
I don't know, I feel like it's nice to have most of these things built into claude desktop as a quick way for Claude to mock up or show me what the data looks like but ultimately want to use my specialized app for the work anyway. If anything, its the ultimate combination - show me the work quickly here first, then port it to the final state inside Excel, Powerpoing, Figma, whatever.
poszlem 2 days ago [-]
For now. I think they are slowly getting to the point where their models are powerful enough that they feel they can compete with everyone in everything.
1broseidon 2 days ago [-]
Valid point. I keep saying the models are the worst they will ever be today. I do always imagine a future where you just ask for something and it instantly just appears. 2-3 years from now things will be drastically different.
tormeh 2 days ago [-]
I guess this is what's supposed to be their moat: Owning your data. Not a bad idea. Yes, you could prompt these tools into being yourself, but once all of the org's data lives in Claude because "we already pay for the license" it'll be hard to switch model provider.
reeredfdfdf 2 days ago [-]
It's only moat after they capture enough companies. Right now, most big organizations are deeply embedded with Microsoft for similar reasons, and the rest use Google. Can't really see them switching to Anthropic. Maybe they'll be popular with startups though.
eastbound 2 days ago [-]
Just yesterday we decided we'd discuss designs natively in Claude, rather than putting them in our collaboration suite (Confluence) to discuss them.
So Anthropic is a Google-Microsoft-Atlassian competitor now. But I was happy with designing in Claude because it's artistic and lenient to mistake; I'd be super-unhappy to put my sales figures and customer lists in Claude and discover it invented the numbers.
the_other 1 days ago [-]
... or undercut you with your customers.
sakesun 2 days ago [-]
A challenger doesn't necessarily win by doing the incumbent's job better. It wins by making the incumbent's job irrelevant.
redhale 2 days ago [-]
Underrated comment.
I've been using Claude Slides since it came out, and haven't touched PowerPoint (or any other presentation tools) since. It doesn't do everything PPT does, but it doesn't matter -- it makes turning an idea into a shareable presentation so fast and easy it's kind of crazy. PPT is effectively dead to me. And it was probably in my top 3 used apps just a couple years ago.
paxy 2 days ago [-]
I don’t understand the need for these side quests. Microsoft has a 40 year lead in spreadsheets. You are not going to dethrone them no matter how good your AI’s code is. And no one is asking you for an excel competitor. Fixing the million problems in existing products that users have already raised (aka the boring work) is a much better use of resources.
lp92 2 days ago [-]
They are building a walled garden platform the same way Apple and Microsoft does. This isn't at all a surprising move.
mk89 2 days ago [-]
I don't see them as side quests but rather as a complement to what they offer.
A typical workflow is: connect via MCP to some data source. Do some stats, transformations, etc. Put the data in a format that Claude understands or will understand better later. Make a UI/story out of it. Keep track of your "things" through visualizations.
Been using this worlflow extensively now. This is their easy wall garden.
xarope 2 days ago [-]
There used to be visicalc, then lotus 1-2-3, and now Excel (as well as open/libreoffice). So I'd like to think there's competition in this space, but time will tell.
Rabbit504030201 1 days ago [-]
Visicalc was an Apple II-bound product that only lived 4-5 years, while 1-2-3 lost to Excel around Windows 95 era - as in OVER THIRTY YEARS AGO. Oversimplification.
Don't forget the current additional players with comparatively low global market share such as Kalligra, Zoho, and WPS.
raincole 2 days ago [-]
When Google Docs were out, Microsoft already had a 20-year lead. So shouldn't have they made Google Doc?
And the story repeats. Google had a 20-year lead in search and LLM definitely has threatened it.
erikgaas 2 days ago [-]
Tell that to google sheets or google docs?? At some point you want to easily interoperate with a document or spreadsheet artifact. There aren't great drop in solutions while keeping everything within managed context. Compiling to and from docx or xls files don't make sense. It makes the most sense to spin up your own. What do you expect them to do instead?
mmcconnell1618 2 days ago [-]
I've seen large enterprise customers who adopt GSuite but still have a few thousand Excel licenses because the people who need certain Excel features, just need them. Average user might find Claude Sheets is enough, but it won't replace Excel everywhere anytime soon.
ActionHank 2 days ago [-]
I've not really seen anyone using sheets for serious number crunching tbh. It does cover 90% of use cases though.
IshKebab 2 days ago [-]
> You are not going to dethrone them no matter how good your AI’s code is.
They absolutely are. Maybe not quickly (let's face it, Excel users are not sprightly), but this is absolutely going to displace Gsuite, and any Excel users who were thinking of moving to it.
I expect Google will respond.
ActionHank 2 days ago [-]
It's a desperation move. They're listing because they're out of runway, they're trying to extend the runway.
coffeebeqn 2 days ago [-]
40 year lead in bloat and legacy cruft maybe
etoxin 2 days ago [-]
These products have already failed.
As a traditional company, if I had invested with a large team to build out these three tools. I wouldn't launch it with a short blog post. It shows how serious they are at maintaining them. People forget there are entire teams/companies supporting SaaS products. Not just the engineers that built them.
2001zhaozhao 2 days ago [-]
The interesting part is that anyone can create these productivity apps now; all that Anthropic has that others don't is the model moat. Namely, people can access models cheaper in Claude.ai compared to paying API prices for other people's tools, and Anthropic's tools come bundled with the discounted model access itself.
In other words they're able to create an entire ecosystem around this cost advantage and there's very little others (without their own models with higher cost-performance than public ones) can do about it.
darkmatriarch 2 days ago [-]
Every time I see an LLM company release tools to compete with existing tool suites it feels like they're just proving we can all now build these quickly ourselves. At least a software engineer could.
Build vs buy keeps getting pushed further to build, which is great for people in general but it feels like Anthropic is digging its own grave proving the only value it can provide is the model itself, and from what it looks like that's still scaling linearly and unprofitably.
elpakal 2 days ago [-]
In some ways it's becoming buy vs spend on tokens
darkmatriarch 1 days ago [-]
That's exactly why I switched to exclusively using local models 6 months ago and haven't looked back. It's a very different beast but it works.
ragdollk 1 days ago [-]
Disclosure: self-promotion.
One of the lesser product releases as part of this announcement was Claude Meetings. If what you want from this launch is meetings turning into work for your agent without being tied to one vendor, we've just released bwat. It's a Zoom bot and app, writes each commitment as a card with the sentence it came from, and one button sends a todo into one of your sessions. It's free.
github.com/qoralai/bwat
htrp 2 days ago [-]
> When you’re done brainstorming, Claude can turn the board into a doc or deck, or bring it into tools like Lucid, Miro, or Vani by Zoho, where you can continue working on it with your team.
either fully commit to disrupting your customers and keep a walled garden or stop building in the space, this incremental approach will only ship confusion
billyp-rva 2 days ago [-]
> When you’re done brainstorming ... where you can continue working on it with your team.
Yeah, if we're done working on it, why are we continuing to work on it? That makes no sense.
vntok 1 days ago [-]
Brainstorming is only part of the work.
kimseungyong 2 days ago [-]
I use artifacts extensively in my work. I use spreadsheets only occasionally at work. Even when using them, the focus was on sharing information through tables rather than complex functions. That was already half a year ago. These days, it's more common to just create them as artifacts and share them.
Now that the spreadsheet is in the artifact, it should be easy to find the Claude artifact’s spreadsheet whenever you need it. I don't think it will expand to Google or MS Spreadsheets.
We must consider that if tools with these basic features continue to be created, people will gradually start using them, eventually leading to a dependency on specific tools.
That ecosystem is expected to grow substantially.
FailMore 1 days ago [-]
Would you be up for giving my project https://smalldocs.org a spin? I would put you on an indefinite free plan for solid feedback from an artifact power user. SmallDocs are a bit like artifacts but they combine document formats + build an agent-searchable tagged library for you while you work. hi@smalldocs.org to get in touch.
yodon 2 days ago [-]
Claude data is a huge move, much bigger than the other two (even if they end up with more users).
All Anthropic needs is to host an S3 clone and they become the default place to put all your company's data because they are the easiest place to analyze the data.
mmcconnell1618 2 days ago [-]
And what company is going to hand over all their data to Anthropic without proper controls, regulatory compliance, sovereignty rules and customer managed encryption and isolation? Could it happen, yes. Will it happen quickly, no.
lp92 2 days ago [-]
Claude Code is already being used by tons of large companies. I'm sure they will figure out how to do it pretty quickly.
raincole 2 days ago [-]
Just like how no company is going to send their whole repo of source code to Claude Code. Right? Right...?
etoxin 2 days ago [-]
This is a bonkers take. No company is going to migrate and reconnect their data to Claude.
ActionHank 2 days ago [-]
Lol, not it's not.
No company that need that level of data ingest and analysis is using Anthropic's tooling over something that is used industry wide.
postatic 2 days ago [-]
Bring in Claude Mail and calendar.. then it’s going to be very interesting..
nitroedge 2 days ago [-]
And Claude payments for all of Claude's services and make everything work with 1-click so that my bots talk to your bots and we live off universal basic income and sleep for half the day. /s
_pdp_ 2 days ago [-]
I really don't get why you would launch this instead of doubling down on your strengths, which are coding and cybersecurity models. Possibly at a better price point than your competitors.
Game_Ender 2 days ago [-]
Lock in: make the product have enough features and user only network effects that companies have to get everyone a Claude seat and sign up for enterprise.
minimaxa 2 days ago [-]
What this is long-term is a strategy to pull corporate customers out of existing incumbents and move them into a more efficient, easier system. Humans always want an advantage, which is speed and ease.
But the trade-off is a move from a bundled cloud service that is currently unlimited use into a new method of token-based content generation, which can be more expensive via API.
It appears to be a business model made directly from the 2000's with expensive mobile phone data charges and overages.
This project comes from a pure love of grids of numbers - and a deep sense that Excel has failed to keep pace with stuff like columnar data (Apache Arrow), fast queries (Rust Polars), proper number types, etc. so tbh don’t feel very threatened.
Feedback - good and bad very welcome.
sakesun 2 days ago [-]
In a way, you actually help them write Claude Sheets.
ibenwandu 1 days ago [-]
I'm just trying to wrap my head around using claude whiteboard as a brainstorming tool like Mural or Miro. Would claude be invited to be provide it's ideas or review ideas provided by the rest of the team?
the-chitmonger 2 days ago [-]
Man, I really hope that Google doesn't see this and decide to start scraping their suite to train Gemini. As it stands, anything not explicitly marked as public isn't scraped so there's that modicum of peace but I'll have to start exclusively using Euro-Office/LibreOffice if this gets more traction and Google decides to make the switch.
toss1 1 days ago [-]
The best time to plant a tree is ten years ago. The second best time is now.
The threat you see coming over the Google horizon is no mirage. The best time to migrate has passed, and it's probably best to not wait until it has already arrived. May your migration go smoothly.
prtmnth 2 days ago [-]
I think the larger play here, both by Anthropic and OpenAI, is how quickly can they become the place of work. Maybe today these products look very basic, but I feel it's part of a larger strategic play for model companies to become office/work suite companies where said suite is powered by their models.
onlyrealcuzzo 2 days ago [-]
The one thing I do really like about Claude / Anthropic is that Claude.ai docs (especially its ability to create HTML docs) seems substantially better than Gemini or ChatGPT.
These seem like natural extensions that I'm sure will be very useful.
brap 2 days ago [-]
This is kind of weird.
Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense if they’d just let Claude connect to your Excel/Google Sheets/whatever?
Doesn’t even need an MCP or official integration at this point, if there’s computer access there’s access to everything.
awb 2 days ago [-]
Less context switching for current workers. For new ones, they might not need those other accounts in the future.
And why share data when you can own it?
nozzlegear 2 days ago [-]
Would much rather use something open-source than something that locks my company into an AI provider. Hell, I'd rather have an AI build something that rips off these three products than get locked in.
iliedanila 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
ragdollk 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
nthState 2 days ago [-]
I wonder how big the team size was that shipped whiteboards specifically, it seems like everyone is making whiteboards these days
sporritt 2 days ago [-]
Does anyone know how much work has to go into making one of these products? Are they a very thin veneer over a model? Is there actually a moat here?
tkdb 2 days ago [-]
Spreadsheets are becoming standard UX elements like text boxes...
scottydelta 2 days ago [-]
Watch them abandon these projects after 6 months.
fblp 2 days ago [-]
I don't think they have a proven history of abandoning projects yet. Why would they when the tools they build (agents) can dramatically reduce the costs of maintaining and improving projects?
BeetleB 2 days ago [-]
They don't have a history. Period.
And I'd argue they sort of abandoned MCP. Claude's support for it is poor.
datadrivenangel 2 days ago [-]
They'll just ignore any user complaints about them being broken or expensive. Anthropic support is bad.
cadamsdotcom 2 days ago [-]
Good to see them go after the big players
Let's get Claude office, Claude auth, Claude notebooks.... maybe call it C Suite.
FailMore 2 days ago [-]
Nice name :)
ajmurmann 22 hours ago [-]
As a user I really don’t want this. I don’t even want Claude Code to have memory. I use a variety of coding agents. In addition to Claude I use Codex and sometimes other models with Pi. They all need to have access to the same memory. Features only available to one will break or slow down my workflows. Of course it also increases lock in which is exactly why they are building this stuff into Claude directly. They are desperately trying to create a mote because currently they have none and thus will struggle to make back theirs massive investments. Good thing I can vibe code much of this tooling quickly
sheepseb 2 days ago [-]
I feel like sometimes Anthropic just wants to be Google but for AI. I get the point of all this is to make the infra for agents to run on collaboratively. I agree with using AI for diverse tasks and sometimes it helps, but I feel that if we are sending "my agent" to work with "your agent" it will just create a lot of headaches for people to check
useruser125524 2 days ago [-]
Claude365
ClaudeCloudServices
ClaudeERP
ClaudeCRM
ClaudeNeuralLink
ClaudeConsciousnessUpload
nitroedge 2 days ago [-]
ClaudeOxygen and ClaudeMedical too
vcryan 2 days ago [-]
Claude vendor lock-in - Claude: not thanks! I prefer you as an easily interchangeable commodity that plays an intermittent role in my broader AI strategy.
mentalgear 2 days ago [-]
So LLM provider want to become all-encompasing app/data suite providers. But really this would just shift your data/money from one paid walled garden (Google/Micro$/Adope) into another: so only a lateral move.
The better solution would be a uniform 'App Suite of the commons' (open-source) with a plugable/switchable data and inference providers.
ozkatz 2 days ago [-]
"better" as in better for the customer, not better for Anthropic :)
Reality is, the crazy valuation given to frontier labs will push them to capture more of the value chain, to make it harder for customers to switch models. Having a best-in-class model is not defensible, long term.
drdrek 2 days ago [-]
I wonder if they are going to be like old google and create and kill a bunch of projects just as people find them useful but they cant see how to make money from them
rwmj 2 days ago [-]
I see they're desperate to lock people and their data into these applications for when the open weights models undercut their main business. Not sure it'll justify the ridiculous valuation, but they need to try something.
haute_cuisine 2 days ago [-]
We aren't getting AGI soon if all they can do is copycat existing business software. Why would they do this when superintelligence is around the corner with pay by token access to it?
walthamstow 2 days ago [-]
Did somebody say vendor lock-in?
There's a reason my co still has Slack and it ain't because of its great features and bug-free app. It's because every written conversation we've ever had is in there.
seanhunter 1 days ago [-]
If this ends people "collaborating" by sending me claude design html docs via slack I'm all for it.
Ancalagon 2 days ago [-]
Taken straight from ClickUp's product bundle list.
cco 2 days ago [-]
Unless Microsoft and Google get their butts into gear, Claude is going to become the basis for running a business and disrupt Office and Workspace.
kybernetikos 2 days ago [-]
I did my first claude slides presentation. I don't see myself voluntarily loading up PowerPoint again.
Now it'll be harder to do the same for word and harder still for excel, but word is doable, and claude can build one off tools better than excel can, so I definitely think that MS should be wary.
tomjen3 2 days ago [-]
Honestly, Excel seems easier to me, with the caveat that Excel serves two purposes.
The "I need some place to organize tabular data" use case is so different that I'm not considering it for the rest of this.
But for actual computation, if you throw it in Claude, it'll figure it out. It's much easier to do than to use Excel. Claude itself isn't limited to Excel; it can use pandas and the much, much improved plotting tools compared to Excel. I'm an OpenAI guy myself and used codecs to have it make me ggplot2 graphs, but then I forgot to specify it and it just used straight-up Python — I think it actually generated them as SVG files. As sad as I was about it, they looked better than the ones I had it make using ggplot2.
Regular Excel doesn't even compare there; not only can ggplot2 make many additional types of graphs, but SVG plotting, Python, and pandas can make literally any chart you want, including things like polar-coordinate charts.
KeplerBoy 2 days ago [-]
Are they? Still seems way more convenient to just connect Claude to whatever people are already running.
Nobody is replacing excel anywhere.
closewith 2 days ago [-]
My experience is that a lot of former Excel use cases have been completely subsumed by Claude/LLMs. Excel files may risk becoming just an interchange format.
davidhunter 2 days ago [-]
This isn’t true. Today we needed to build a model for our startup to forecast headcount. Usually I’d use excel. Instead Claude built an app for me. More powerful features in a fraction of the time.
NichoPaolucci 2 days ago [-]
You built an "app" though - you could have done that with the model du jour, right?
You now have that app forever and nothing connects it to Claude other than the comment saying "this isn't just rounding — it's the single source of truth for the shared ledger boundary, not a formatting concern."
While I agree that spreadsheets are likely to be used less by regular folk, the idea that we'll become reliant on claude feels unlikely.
davidhunter 1 days ago [-]
"You could have done that with the model du jour, right?"
> Yes, I did it with my 'model du jour' - I opened up the Claude web app, asked it for what I wanted, and it built it. My 'model du jour' is Opus 5.5. Next week it might be something else.
"You now have that app forever"
> I keep the app for as long as it's valuable. Same as an excel spreadsheet. I can amend it or rebuild it from scratch any time I want.
"The idea that we'll become reliant on claude feels unlikely"
> My point is that we will become less reliant on excel. Excel is a way for normies to store data, visualise it, write 'code', and share 'artifacts'. LLMs allow normies to do each of better with a better interface. I'm not wed to Claude specifically. Companies (including mine) are creating claude artifacts which are being relied on by people in the org to make key decisions. Historically, these would be shared spreadsheets.
BeetleB 2 days ago [-]
You're a single person in a startup.
For good or bad, big companies run on Excel.
At my last job - a large tech company - if it wasn't in Excel, then engineers and HR wouldn't use it. The team had a tool that collected data from various databases for the end user and did some analytics. The code was in Python. The output was an Excel file.
I asked why they didn't use pandas.
"Because the users are just going to take the output and put it in Excel."
It was a very successful tool. No one needed to use it so we had to ensure users liked it. All due to the team lead's wisdom on how big companies operate.
They also wanted us to autogenerate PowerPoint files. We gave up on that. The spec is a mess.
davidhunter 2 days ago [-]
They run on excel today. They will run on code in the future. Excel was a way for normies to write code with all the limitations that came with it. Now normies can just write the code.
I used to work as a trader for a major investment bank. Everything was excel. I can’t see it staying that way.
BeetleB 2 days ago [-]
> Now normies can just write the code.
Normies know enough Excel to debug their "code". Will they be able to debug code AI produces?
> I used to work as a trader for a major investment bank. Everything was excel. I can’t see it staying that way.
How much of that Excel usage is part of the regular flow? As in several different teams using and sharing Excel files with a common template, so they can have macros that depend on the shape of data in the spreadsheet?
If the traders are mostly just using it for their own individual analyses, I can believe you. If they're sharing the Excel files across disparate departments ... it will be tougher.
A much simpler solution that a full blown replacement is simply having AI read, understand and edit Excel files. Why go with a completely different solution if the AI can solve all your problems within Excel?
davidhunter 1 days ago [-]
Excel is used to store data, visualise data, manipulate data, write 'code', and share artifacts (worksheets). Writing software is better for all of these things, but normies weren't able to write software themselves. Now they can.
I also reject the premise that excel is simpler. Building a spreadsheet of any real complexity is a genuinely learned skill. It's hard. Often you are wrangling with the limitations of excel. Version control, tests, permissioning etc is poor in excel but a solved problem in software.
closewith 2 days ago [-]
> "Because the users are just going to take the output and put it in Excel."
I wonder how long ago this was, as now it's likely that Excel file will now be opened and interpreted by an LLM rather than Excel. The corporate world is changing fast.
partiallypro 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
cco 2 days ago [-]
A 100% compatible version of Excel is well within Anthropic's capabilities.
pluralmonad 1 days ago [-]
That's not even within Microsoft's capabilities.
2 days ago [-]
dist-epoch 2 days ago [-]
Nadella already said that they expect to have more revenue from agents than from humans.
They are shifting to building stuff for agents, not for humans.
mk89 2 days ago [-]
Ironically, Claude is building stuff for humans :)
fblp 2 days ago [-]
Yep, just need Claude Mail (Cmail, anyone?) and Cluade Docs and you have a strong competitor to Google Workspaces. I'd consider using Cmail to start getting out of googles ad ecosystem.
nanocat 2 days ago [-]
and… into anthropic’s instead??
baxtr 2 days ago [-]
You mean like slack did?
librasteve 2 days ago [-]
Claude? no.
Omarchy? yep.
franticgecko3 2 days ago [-]
More unlikely-to-be-sticky LLM products to throw at the nearest wall.
AbuAssar 2 days ago [-]
it is said that anthropic built a fully bootable os from scratch in a week, what stops them from building any other software?
mentalgear 2 days ago [-]
CLAUDE(/openAI) Everything soon - at least before the IPO.
hbarka 2 days ago [-]
Nice to see this is also on Teams and Enterprise, naturally.
dogscatstrees 2 days ago [-]
Claude is missing an email delivery of these artifacts.
tomaac_ 2 days ago [-]
Coming next... Claude E-mail service.
latentsea 2 days ago [-]
I read it as Claude Whistleblowers
WhatsName 2 days ago [-]
Is that really a smart idea with respect to the IPO? Why not leave the risk and reward of building slop on top of AI to the industry?
For one, maintaining a lot of apps and connectors costs time and focus for a marginal return. Also it burns relationships with everyone building on top of your API if they can be disrupted anytime.
Kinrany 2 days ago [-]
If their valuation is justified, they WILL disrupt every SaaS worth disrupting where most of the value is in the first S. There isn't enough money in selling a commodity.
esafak 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
ex1fm3ta 2 days ago [-]
Anthropic is playing in Alphabet's field
chasd00 2 days ago [-]
The need a reporting and analytics offering (if they don't have one already). If i can tell it "ok report over this data, join it together on these fildss, bucket by that field" then review and say "no wait, filter by this other field and only show me addresses in Ohio... oh wait let the viewer choose a state and also let them choose a financial quarter. Find out our financial quarters from our website. ok add an appropriate graph to show change of field X over time" then finally "publish and notify users the report is available with a link". That would make a part of my job a lot easier.
arthurcolle 2 days ago [-]
I will never use this, and neither should anyone else.
vntok 1 days ago [-]
Why not?
adolph 1 days ago [-]
Harbor is currently in a private preview under Apple’s Claris brand
Seems like they are already touting agentic development with a core of Filemaker [0]. Moof!
Were you a paying Figma user before, or using the free tier?
I don't see people switching to Claude sheets overnight & the messaging from anthropic will likely become less effusive over time (short-/medium-term). But I'd be surprised if this doesn't make significant inroads in the long-term.
You'd think google would be able to catch up here because they have all the pieces, but then maybe they're too locked in by virtue of having a large existing user base so they can't make the same radical UX changes that anthropic can.
It was so understated and unobtrusive compared to all the other hamfisted, oversold AI features everywhere.
I was even more shocked when it kind of did what I was going to do in those cells. And just like most spreadsheets, this was an abomination of a ”spreadsheet”; more of a two dimensional scratch pad for loosely organised text.
I don't quite follow you. Are you talking about Mermaid's lack of decision when laying out diagrams?
I'm working on a tool that makes it easier for me to work with mermaid diagrams (mermaid is a great intermediary format for representing certain types of information, e.g. software architecure, but its syntax does not work well with my brain), so I'm interested in alternative concepts that make it easier to work with these types of things.
Figma is the default for teams but is losing a lot of stickiness.
What these tools are generally missing is a way for the user to "fix stuff" that isnt just prompting. Once they add things like that, added to model improvements... it's just going to be a cost story: which one is cheaper.
I don’t see myself ever using an off-the-shelf analytics package again.
(observed error rate for me is much much much lower than 1/10)
OpenAI did something similar with Sales Assistant last year. Haven't heard of anyone using it.
Second, Claude Design doesn't need to move forward, it just works and is perfectly usable. I don't know what I'd want from it - it's not meant for you to "manually" move things around anyway, you just talk to the agent. And I've designed more than a few things on Design.
History is repeating itself AI natively.
Claude Design almost completely solves that. One dedicated designer can make a Claude Design System and then everything it makes from there stays on brand with essentially zero effort. And it is super intuitive to get to a usable Design System. Every time I use it I think "This is how AI is supposed to feel."
1. Have one agent build it and then another check(Usually the agent that checks is a bigger model or with more effort) 2. Make it deterministic, make sure you have a list of accepted fonts based on your brand guidelines. Have claude create a script that checks what fonts are used and if they follow the list, if not send it back to be redone, similar thing can be done to check things like header followed by a subheader(I usually have it create designs in html so it is a simple check of is there a h3 following say a h2)
I don't think there is a reasonable expectation that these new tools will simply end Google Workspace. Google are going to be just fine to do whatever they want with their stuff, and they have the customers.
Anthropic can just do this for a new generation of people and businesses, and establish themselves here over time.
For me, this is simply a first-party UI for Claude. So they have better control over the presentation layer + some extra features on top.
It's not meant to be equivalent to Google Sheets or Excel.
So yes, not dead and clearly good for people who want that additional layer of control, but also nowhere where it used to be.
is this about growth, the userbase or the product? userbase is growing and the product seems to work fine; as for growth I'm not sure that was what people talked about when they said Figma would *die* but even then 43% seems fine?
Figma also has MCP and other AI features. You can use it in agentic workflows just fine!
It's also not Anthropic only. Or OpenAI only. Businesses are leaning heavily into model and harness diversity, particularly open and bespoke variants..
Initially they were adopted by customers with the simplest use cases and the products grew over time to what they are.
The next set of startups might just have a Claude sub when they are small and grow with the product
I expect that Anthropic will have success in some of their side hustles if they're reinforced by the model ecosystem and double down on them, but you should also expect that at some point in the future we will talk about the "Anthropic Graveyard".
Whiteboarding is the main thing I do in my AI build processes outside of Claude - if they can do it native + multiplayer, it's going to be a huge UX improvement for a lot of users.
Why does it show that? Maybe they have tens of billions of dollars and the bandwidth to do more.
I read this as: We'll build anything and everything into Claude eventually.
How does this work long-term? Is the new reality going to be picking an AI provider for all of your SaSS tooling, similar to Cloud providers for infra? Hopefully competition thrives.
Dots in particular display some insidious methodology, they've hidden the "programmable" portions of an agent. They want to make it 'magic' (all your work goes through a single tool) but... that's pretty much exactly what businesses DON'T want. We need to see what it's doing, accessing, working with, underlying data, etc... It's an explicit business requirement for us.
The more they can 'hide' what the backend does, the harder it is to get away from the product.
Buuuuut, I don't think it's going to work. I can still export it somehow if I want to, and it would probably take 10-15 minutes... The whole point of these agents is that they're 'plug and play' with whatever technology you want.
And if they don't build them this way, someone will whip up an open source version that does it cheaper and more transparently in a couple of weeks.
Software being free now hits both of these companies exactly where they want protection.
this is my biggest gripe with dot. it doesn't integrate very well with my "agent ecosystem". It doesn't see my boxen. It doesn't load any agents.md. It like... is on an island and the only way it talks to the world is.... opaque magic.
Well, isn't that the natural end result of an AGI?
No more software, no more deciding what apps you need. It's all just Claude. Except now you're pulling 10kW to add up a column of numbers.
I see them — and others, across model providers, startups and legacy companies — as rapidly exploring the problem and solution spaces. By building agentic features into familiar tools you give people what they need to explore and build new paradigms and approaches. Maybe white board + design tool is a killer app that truly takes Figma’s place, or spreadsheet + apps built in house or or or.
At this point having a clear vision of the future is a liability because you’re probably wrong.
Better to build existing tools with agents built in and let your users discover the killer use cases.
“Please remove this page break I can’t figure out how to get rid of and someone else added”
Co-pilot: “Sorry I’m unable to do that but you can follows these same instructions you can find on the Internet to accomplish that”.
Claude: “I will literally rebuild Word from the ground up to solve this problem if that’s what it takes (but here is how to actually solve your problem), oh and do you want this exported in the best format for this software, this other software, or in these 15 file formats? Oh I don’t have native capabilities for that format - ok let’s build a script and convert….”
You get the picture. Competition is here, and it will get even better. Many SaaS companies will die. Good. Many of them only delivered short-term value solving artificial constrains or gaps in software.
I suspect the goal is partly starting a walled garden.
"Llms are interchangeable? Our harness/toolset isn't".
It's a way to get a moat I guess.
It doesn't sound like a business for the scale they're aiming for though. Taking a bite of the MS office's pie doesn't seem to me like a trillion dollar company move.
I think thats more like: "We'll build anything and everything into Claude eventually with the statistical median level of vibe-coded features."
That might work for some use cases but I doubt serious Excel nerds are going to drop it because Claude has a spreadsheet like tool.
The rest of the world moves on using LLMs as tools.
Anthropic is eventually bought and stripped for parts.
I'm building https://smalldocs.org / https://github.com/espressoplease/smalldocs. My take is that the siloed approach of previous document formats is now redundant. The document formats were isolated because we needed heavy tools for humans to do the work. Now we need lightweight javascript predominately for rending as agents do the work, so document formats can be blended.
This means SmallDocs allows an agent to put together a document (the underlying format is markdown with rich custom rendering on top) with text, diagrams, a multi tab spreadsheet, charts, code, slides, etc.
Some example SmallDocs:
* AlphaFold 3: capabilities, evidence and operational limits (diagram, spreadsheets, charts, code, math): https://smalldocs.org/s/k9BtoviHg1eMsWzrSDBVZM#k=v0oIAbORXDj...
* Profitable growth can run out of cash (slides, spreadsheet, charts): https://smalldocs.org/s/nfCr0EEduLQwZAr0_v9ZR2#k=tv_BjigEYwt...
I like the idea but failed to grasp how it works and more importantly how to use it and why it could be useful. Many sentences sound just like what my LLM produces when writing READMEs.
I'm not anti-AI for coding but README is one of the few left remaining places where LLMs suck, no matter which model/harness/instructions I use, it's always gibberish. Someone needs to review it line by line if it needs to be human readable. Especially for this kind of project which is not straightforward.
I guess WYSIWYG paper-oriented document editors are still relevant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc
Apple OpenDoc Technology Intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFJdjk2rq4E
I really don't understand why people can't see the future, in ten years the speed at which AI will create apps will be astonishing. Any app, ask and get it done instantly. So if one provider (your AI provider) has them all why would you go around looking for the same thing if you already have them in one place?
I use DeepSeek because Claude never allowed me to play with it (living in Venezuela), but I know people that started with Claude just use it everyday and by inertia they won't switch, no reason at all. Just ask Claude for anything and it will deliver. Same for any AI. Retention is the key word, tools, apps, services, plugins, libraries, all in one place, everything.
AI is the new OS, the new browser, the new marketplace
The latter is the key to Anthropic's IPO price. Why spend the time building tooling to do a thing when you can just ask the magic robot to do the thing, each time?
Why do you assume people don't understand this? I think most people, especially those on HN are painfully aware of this.
At least now, it depends on availability of requirements. If someone asks for a notepad app, AI has a ton of information available to go off of.
If you are asking for an app that is some esoteric pile of business logic, not sure how app would know what to build.
... it's already astonishing and nearly instant.
One interesting case I worked on though was structured content (sbom, api, etc..) content into markdown as well so you could have a readable and understandable repository or project.
It’s pretty amazing what you can do with a CI/CD integrated cli tool or AI agent sharing content with people, back and forth.
Take a look at https://marble.md/ if you're interested. It's a nice markdown editor with all the collaboration features from GDocs
All the buttons of the UI: Gone! Replaced by a single button: Apple Content.
I was an absolute fan of Apple Keynote, been spreading it to my employees for 15 years, it was bare-bones, straightforward, uncluttered and direct; I just struggle do SIMPLE things in it now!
Next step, domains and email?
Also this differs from Claude design imo - which was too token heavy and not easy enough for a human to manipulate without prompting. Here, the human and agent user have a similar level of control.
So Anthropic is a Google-Microsoft-Atlassian competitor now. But I was happy with designing in Claude because it's artistic and lenient to mistake; I'd be super-unhappy to put my sales figures and customer lists in Claude and discover it invented the numbers.
I've been using Claude Slides since it came out, and haven't touched PowerPoint (or any other presentation tools) since. It doesn't do everything PPT does, but it doesn't matter -- it makes turning an idea into a shareable presentation so fast and easy it's kind of crazy. PPT is effectively dead to me. And it was probably in my top 3 used apps just a couple years ago.
A typical workflow is: connect via MCP to some data source. Do some stats, transformations, etc. Put the data in a format that Claude understands or will understand better later. Make a UI/story out of it. Keep track of your "things" through visualizations.
Been using this worlflow extensively now. This is their easy wall garden.
Don't forget the current additional players with comparatively low global market share such as Kalligra, Zoho, and WPS.
And the story repeats. Google had a 20-year lead in search and LLM definitely has threatened it.
They absolutely are. Maybe not quickly (let's face it, Excel users are not sprightly), but this is absolutely going to displace Gsuite, and any Excel users who were thinking of moving to it.
I expect Google will respond.
As a traditional company, if I had invested with a large team to build out these three tools. I wouldn't launch it with a short blog post. It shows how serious they are at maintaining them. People forget there are entire teams/companies supporting SaaS products. Not just the engineers that built them.
In other words they're able to create an entire ecosystem around this cost advantage and there's very little others (without their own models with higher cost-performance than public ones) can do about it.
Build vs buy keeps getting pushed further to build, which is great for people in general but it feels like Anthropic is digging its own grave proving the only value it can provide is the model itself, and from what it looks like that's still scaling linearly and unprofitably.
One of the lesser product releases as part of this announcement was Claude Meetings. If what you want from this launch is meetings turning into work for your agent without being tied to one vendor, we've just released bwat. It's a Zoom bot and app, writes each commitment as a card with the sentence it came from, and one button sends a todo into one of your sessions. It's free.
github.com/qoralai/bwat
either fully commit to disrupting your customers and keep a walled garden or stop building in the space, this incremental approach will only ship confusion
Yeah, if we're done working on it, why are we continuing to work on it? That makes no sense.
We must consider that if tools with these basic features continue to be created, people will gradually start using them, eventually leading to a dependency on specific tools.
That ecosystem is expected to grow substantially.
All Anthropic needs is to host an S3 clone and they become the default place to put all your company's data because they are the easiest place to analyze the data.
No company that need that level of data ingest and analysis is using Anthropic's tooling over something that is used industry wide.
But the trade-off is a move from a bundled cloud service that is currently unlimited use into a new method of token-based content generation, which can be more expensive via API.
It appears to be a business model made directly from the 2000's with expensive mobile phone data charges and overages.
This project comes from a pure love of grids of numbers - and a deep sense that Excel has failed to keep pace with stuff like columnar data (Apache Arrow), fast queries (Rust Polars), proper number types, etc. so tbh don’t feel very threatened.
Feedback - good and bad very welcome.
The threat you see coming over the Google horizon is no mirage. The best time to migrate has passed, and it's probably best to not wait until it has already arrived. May your migration go smoothly.
These seem like natural extensions that I'm sure will be very useful.
Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense if they’d just let Claude connect to your Excel/Google Sheets/whatever?
Doesn’t even need an MCP or official integration at this point, if there’s computer access there’s access to everything.
And why share data when you can own it?
And I'd argue they sort of abandoned MCP. Claude's support for it is poor.
Let's get Claude office, Claude auth, Claude notebooks.... maybe call it C Suite.
ClaudeCloudServices
ClaudeERP
ClaudeCRM
ClaudeNeuralLink
ClaudeConsciousnessUpload
The better solution would be a uniform 'App Suite of the commons' (open-source) with a plugable/switchable data and inference providers.
Reality is, the crazy valuation given to frontier labs will push them to capture more of the value chain, to make it harder for customers to switch models. Having a best-in-class model is not defensible, long term.
There's a reason my co still has Slack and it ain't because of its great features and bug-free app. It's because every written conversation we've ever had is in there.
Now it'll be harder to do the same for word and harder still for excel, but word is doable, and claude can build one off tools better than excel can, so I definitely think that MS should be wary.
The "I need some place to organize tabular data" use case is so different that I'm not considering it for the rest of this.
But for actual computation, if you throw it in Claude, it'll figure it out. It's much easier to do than to use Excel. Claude itself isn't limited to Excel; it can use pandas and the much, much improved plotting tools compared to Excel. I'm an OpenAI guy myself and used codecs to have it make me ggplot2 graphs, but then I forgot to specify it and it just used straight-up Python — I think it actually generated them as SVG files. As sad as I was about it, they looked better than the ones I had it make using ggplot2.
Regular Excel doesn't even compare there; not only can ggplot2 make many additional types of graphs, but SVG plotting, Python, and pandas can make literally any chart you want, including things like polar-coordinate charts.
Nobody is replacing excel anywhere.
You now have that app forever and nothing connects it to Claude other than the comment saying "this isn't just rounding — it's the single source of truth for the shared ledger boundary, not a formatting concern."
While I agree that spreadsheets are likely to be used less by regular folk, the idea that we'll become reliant on claude feels unlikely.
> Yes, I did it with my 'model du jour' - I opened up the Claude web app, asked it for what I wanted, and it built it. My 'model du jour' is Opus 5.5. Next week it might be something else.
"You now have that app forever"
> I keep the app for as long as it's valuable. Same as an excel spreadsheet. I can amend it or rebuild it from scratch any time I want.
"The idea that we'll become reliant on claude feels unlikely"
> My point is that we will become less reliant on excel. Excel is a way for normies to store data, visualise it, write 'code', and share 'artifacts'. LLMs allow normies to do each of better with a better interface. I'm not wed to Claude specifically. Companies (including mine) are creating claude artifacts which are being relied on by people in the org to make key decisions. Historically, these would be shared spreadsheets.
For good or bad, big companies run on Excel.
At my last job - a large tech company - if it wasn't in Excel, then engineers and HR wouldn't use it. The team had a tool that collected data from various databases for the end user and did some analytics. The code was in Python. The output was an Excel file.
I asked why they didn't use pandas.
"Because the users are just going to take the output and put it in Excel."
It was a very successful tool. No one needed to use it so we had to ensure users liked it. All due to the team lead's wisdom on how big companies operate.
They also wanted us to autogenerate PowerPoint files. We gave up on that. The spec is a mess.
I used to work as a trader for a major investment bank. Everything was excel. I can’t see it staying that way.
Normies know enough Excel to debug their "code". Will they be able to debug code AI produces?
> I used to work as a trader for a major investment bank. Everything was excel. I can’t see it staying that way.
How much of that Excel usage is part of the regular flow? As in several different teams using and sharing Excel files with a common template, so they can have macros that depend on the shape of data in the spreadsheet?
If the traders are mostly just using it for their own individual analyses, I can believe you. If they're sharing the Excel files across disparate departments ... it will be tougher.
A much simpler solution that a full blown replacement is simply having AI read, understand and edit Excel files. Why go with a completely different solution if the AI can solve all your problems within Excel?
I also reject the premise that excel is simpler. Building a spreadsheet of any real complexity is a genuinely learned skill. It's hard. Often you are wrangling with the limitations of excel. Version control, tests, permissioning etc is poor in excel but a solved problem in software.
I wonder how long ago this was, as now it's likely that Excel file will now be opened and interpreted by an LLM rather than Excel. The corporate world is changing fast.
They are shifting to building stuff for agents, not for humans.
Omarchy? yep.
For one, maintaining a lot of apps and connectors costs time and focus for a marginal return. Also it burns relationships with everyone building on top of your API if they can be disrupted anytime.
Seems like they are already touting agentic development with a core of Filemaker [0]. Moof!
0. https://www.claris.com/filemaker/agentic-development/
Their competition is offering good enough models for vastly better prices and they are making products that their customers don't need.
I feel like there will be a site similar to google graveyard for all these AI+X products that OAI and ANT are throwing out.