Beyond the Grid: The Search for a More Humane Way to Compute

It is with a heavy heart that we recently announced the shutdown of Decipad. The journey of building a new kind of tool for numerical computation has been one of the most challenging and rewarding experiences of my life. As we close this chapter, I find myself reflecting on the very problem we set out to solve: is there a better, more humane way to work with numbers than the spreadsheet?

Spreadsheets are, without a doubt, one of the most important inventions in the history of computing. They democratized numerical computation, empowering millions to model, analyze, and understand the world through data. For that, we owe them a debt of gratitude. But as with any tool, we must also acknowledge their limitations. And it is in that spirit of reflection, not criticism, that I want to explore the friction points of the spreadsheet paradigm.

The Friction of the Grid

For all their power, spreadsheets introduce a subtle friction into our thinking. They force us to conform to the grid, and in doing so, we often lose something in the translation from our mental model to the digital one.

• The Problem of Unlabeled Values: In a spreadsheet, a number is just a number. It lacks inherent meaning. We might have a column labeled “Revenue,” but the values in that column are just numbers. There’s nothing to stop us from accidentally adding a “Revenue” value to a “Cost” value, leading to a meaningless result.
• The Danger of Naked Units: The lack of a unit system is a classic spreadsheet pitfall. Is that “10” in a cell 10 dollars, 10 euros, or 10 meters? The context is often implicit, living in the mind of the creator, and easily lost when the spreadsheet is shared.
• The Illusion of Time: Spreadsheets lack a robust abstraction for time. We can create columns for dates, but modeling the flow of time, dependencies, and projections in a way that is both accurate and easy to understand is a significant challenge.
• The Spaghetti of Complex Relationships: As our models grow, so does the complexity of the relationships between cells. Tracing the logic of a complex spreadsheet can feel like untangling a plate of spaghetti, making it difficult to debug and even harder to trust.
• The Flatness of the Grid: The two-dimensional nature of the grid makes it difficult to model problems with more dimensions. We resort to clever hacks and workarounds, but the underlying structure of the tool is not designed for the multi-faceted nature of the real world.
• The Silo of Knowledge: Collaboration in spreadsheets is often a matter of passing files back and forth. The knowledge, the “why” behind the numbers, is siloed in the mind of the creator, making it difficult for others to understand, critique, and build upon the work.

The Allure and Illusion of AI

It’s tempting to look at the rise of AI and see a solution to these problems. And in many ways, AI can help. It can automate tasks, generate formulas, and even help us make sense of our data. But I believe that AI, in its current form, is a sophisticated workaround, not a fundamental solution.

AI often disguises unnecessary technical complexity by writing the code for us. But because the underlying technical foundation of the spreadsheet is at the wrong level of abstraction, AI can only do so much. It can help us navigate the complexity, but it doesn’t remove it. And in doing so, it can make it even more difficult for us to take a critical view of the results and to create a structure that represents knowledge in a more formal way.

A More Humane Interface to Computation

So, where do we go from here? I don’t have all the answers. But I believe that the demise of Decipad is not the end of the story. It is a comma, not a period. The need for a better way to work with numbers is more pressing than ever.

I believe that we need to move beyond the grid and create a new generation of tools that are not just powerful, but also clear, collaborative, and humane. Tools that allow us to model the world as we see it, not as the grid dictates. Tools that empower us to build shared understanding, not just to share files.

The journey of Decipad has been a humbling one. It has taught me the immense difficulty of challenging a paradigm as entrenched as the spreadsheet. But it has also reinforced my belief that there is a better way. And I, for one, am not ready to give up the search.