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TableTalk: Scaffolding Spreadsheet Development with a Language Agent

Created by
  • Haebom

Author

Jenny T. Liang, Aayush Kumar, Yasharth Bajpai, Sumit Gulwani, Vu Le, Chris Parnin, Arjun Radhakrishna, Ashish Tiwari, Emerson Murphy-Hill, Guastavo Soares

Outline

To address the challenges of spreadsheet programming, this paper presents TableTalk, a spreadsheet programming agent based on a large-scale language model. Implementing three design principles (scaffolding, flexibility, and incrementality) derived from a study of seven spreadsheet programmers and 85 Excel templates, TableTalk guides structured planning based on professional workflows and generates three potential next steps that allow programmers to tailor the plan to their needs. Using predefined tools, TableTalk generates spreadsheet components and builds spreadsheets incrementally. A study of 20 programmers demonstrated that TableTalk produced spreadsheets 2.3 times higher quality than baselines and reduced cognitive load and thinking time by 12.6%. This paper presents design guidelines for agent-based spreadsheet programming tools and discusses Takeaways for spreadsheet programming, end-user programming, AI-assisted programming, and human-agent collaboration.

Takeaways, Limitations

Takeaways:
We demonstrate that leveraging agents based on large-scale language models can improve the efficiency and quality of spreadsheet programming.
TableTalk's design principles—scaffolding, flexibility, and incrementality—provide useful guidance for the future development of AI-enabled programming tools.
Demonstrates that user experience can be improved by reducing cognitive load and thinking time.
Provides new perspectives on spreadsheet programming, end-user programming, AI-assisted programming, and human-agent collaboration.
Limitations:
TableTalk's performance evaluation is limited to a specific dataset and group of programmers. Testing across a wider range of environments and users is needed.
High reliance on predefined tools may limit adaptability to various spreadsheet tasks.
There may be a lack of transparency regarding the agent's plan generation and coordination process. Additional features may be needed to enable users to understand and control the agent's decision-making process.
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