slfnflctd 7 days ago

If I understand this correctly, it looks like the promise I saw in that 'Record Macro' button in my Excel toolbar in the 1990s might finally be coming to fruition in a wider and more capable sense! A pleasant surprise effect of the new AI situation if true.

I noticed in another comment that you said some steps can be made 'optional' (e.g. clicking through a modal). In my ancient Excel macro adventure, what I learned was that I had to tweak the heck out of the VBA code that Record button generated, which led to me just straight writing VBA for everything and eventually abandoning the Record feature entirely. I had a similar experience later on with AutoHotKey. What are the analogous aspects of Autotab to this? Also, to what extent is hand-manipulating the underlying automation possible and/or necessary to get optimal results?

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jonasnelle 6 days ago

Indeed! A little secret: Internally we call the skills/workflows in Autotab macros :)

Currently there is a bit of a learning curve for training Autotab to be really reliable in hard cases. We expect we’ll be able to decrease significantly in the next few months, as we get models to do more of the thinking about how to best codify a given task solution/workflow. As an intuition pump for why we expect such rapid progress: in the scenario you described you’d just have a model write the VBA code for you.