Fair point, some counterpoints (my POV obviously not GiveWell’s):
1. GW could keep the sheets as the source of truth, but maintain a tool that exports to another format for LLM digestion. Alternately, at least commit to maintaining a sheets-based version of each model
2. Spreadsheets are not particularly legible when they get very complicated, especially when the formulas in cells refer to cell numberings (B12^2/C13 etc) rather than labeled ranges.
3. LLMs make code a lot more legible and accessible these days, and tools like Claude Code make it easy to create nice displays and interfaces for people to more clearly digest code-based models
We are planning to keep spreadsheets as the primary format for our models (for transparency/simplicity reasons like you both noted). However, some way to convert spreadsheets to code for LLM digestion and potentially building web apps or running more complex uncertainty analyses would be valuable to us.
Definitely not asking anyone to spend time on this for us! I was just wondering if anyone was aware of a good way to do the conversion.
We did a conversion from Excel to R in 2025, although not LLM assisted. It took about three months, which I would say was a disappointing but realistic downside-case timeline (we basically budgeted for two months and something complex came up). So if you’re finding you can get it done in weeks rather than months with an LLM you’re actually a long way ahead of the state of the art.
Fair point, some counterpoints (my POV obviously not GiveWell’s):
1. GW could keep the sheets as the source of truth, but maintain a tool that exports to another format for LLM digestion. Alternately, at least commit to maintaining a sheets-based version of each model
2. Spreadsheets are not particularly legible when they get very complicated, especially when the formulas in cells refer to cell numberings (B12^2/C13 etc) rather than labeled ranges.
3. LLMs make code a lot more legible and accessible these days, and tools like Claude Code make it easy to create nice displays and interfaces for people to more clearly digest code-based models
Thank you both!
We are planning to keep spreadsheets as the primary format for our models (for transparency/simplicity reasons like you both noted). However, some way to convert spreadsheets to code for LLM digestion and potentially building web apps or running more complex uncertainty analyses would be valuable to us.
Definitely not asking anyone to spend time on this for us! I was just wondering if anyone was aware of a good way to do the conversion.
We did a conversion from Excel to R in 2025, although not LLM assisted. It took about three months, which I would say was a disappointing but realistic downside-case timeline (we basically budgeted for two months and something complex came up). So if you’re finding you can get it done in weeks rather than months with an LLM you’re actually a long way ahead of the state of the art.