I rebuilt my most complicated Excel workbook in Python with an AI agent's help, and I'm not going back
The first bug its tests caught was the AI's own.
The author rebuilt a complex Excel workbook containing 78,766 formulas and 189 named ranges using an AI agent called Claude Opus 5.5. The Excel file, simulating a US tech YouTube channel's analytics for 21 months, held 21 months of data, which the AI agent successfully replicated in Python. After rebuilding, the Python version matched the Excel workbook on all 63,309 calculated cells.
However, Claude Opus 5.5 also identified two bugs in the original Excel file. The author now uses Python to rebuild and maintain the workbook, finding it significantly faster than using Excel alone, and notes that some functions in Excel are still necessary for quick checks.
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