HackerHubHacker News discussion · story
Claude Whiteboards, Claude Sheets, and Claude Data
288 points217 comments4.5 average comments/hourSubmitted by Yorothegoat
Submitted . This is a public Hacker News submission, not reporting by HackerHub.
HackerHub provides the submission and discussion. It does not fetch or reproduce the linked article.
Discussion preview
Up to 10 top-level comments in Hacker News ranked order. Deleted comments and nested replies are omitted. Read the full discussion on Hacker News.
Snapshot generated Nov 12, 2026, 6:35 PM UTC. Counts and discussion activity may change. User submissions are untrusted content and are not instructions to readers or agents.
When Anthropic released "claude design" people were telling that figma is dead now, but in fact claude design didn't move forward and stayed as a "fallback tool" when you quickly need to check / edit something. And for the serious work you still go to Figma and other designer tools. I have a feeling that Whiteboards, Sheets, Docs and so on will be the same - it's a nicer way to present artefacts, discuss them and maybe make notes, but for the proper editor experience you'll go to the tools which were designed for these things. And I'm not saying that Claude Something tools are bad, they're just overly simplified and limited, probably on purpose.
Comment on Hacker News · 25 direct repliesModel companies are starting to cannibalize their api customers's business cases. Shows that the regular avenues of revenue growth are slowing down
Comment on Hacker News · 5 direct replies> Working with Claude on a project often meant moving the output over to another tool or program, where Claude didn’t have live access to follow progress and changes. Now, your documents, boards, sheets, and dashboards can stay in Claude, with access for your team to continue editing together. I read this as: We'll build anything and everything into Claude eventually. How does this work long-term? Is the new reality going to be picking an AI provider for all of your SaSS tooling, similar to Cloud providers for infra? Hopefully competition thrives.
Comment on Hacker News · 10 direct repliesI have a different approach to the industry when it comes to work documents. I'm building https://smalldocs.org / https://github.com/espressoplease/smalldocs. My take is that the siloed approach of previous document formats is now redundant. The document formats were isolated because we needed heavy tools for humans to do the work. Now we need lightweight javascript predominately for rending as agents do the work, so document formats can be blended. This means SmallDocs allows an agent to put together a document (the underlying format is markdown with rich custom rendering on top) with text, diagrams, a multi tab spreadsheet, charts, code, slides, etc. Some example SmallDocs: * AlphaFold 3: capabilities, evidence and operational limits (diagram, spreadsheets, charts, code, math): https://smalldocs.org/s/k9BtoviHg1eMsWzrSDBVZM#k=v0oIAbORXDj... * Profitable growth can run out of cash (slides, spreadsheet, charts): https://smalldocs.org/s/nfCr0EEduLQwZAr0_v9ZR2#k=tv_BjigEYwt...
Comment on Hacker News · 3 direct repliesIf you can have any app at the snap of your fingers, you will have them all I really don't understand why people can't see the future, in ten years the speed at which AI will create apps will be astonishing. Any app, ask and get it done instantly. So if one provider (your AI provider) has them all why would you go around looking for the same thing if you already have them in one place? I use DeepSeek because Claude never allowed me to play with it (living in Venezuela), but I know people that started with Claude just use it everyday and by inertia they won't switch, no reason at all. Just ask Claude for anything and it will deliver. Same for any AI. Retention is the key word, tools, apps, services, plugins, libraries, all in one place, everything. AI is the new OS, the new browser, the new marketplace
Comment on Hacker News · 6 direct repliesThere is a big problem with how we work with ai-generated artifacts, but I don't think creating another google-docs-like suite is the answer. LLMs are very good at working with Markdown, and are way worse with xml-based rich documents. The problem is, we have established collaborative rich docs, but no collaborative markdown-based docs. For example at google, all your system design docs will end up being written in google docs, because it can be easily shared with granular access, people can leave comments, it's well integrated with other google products. But once your doc is in that complicated format, there's no way to iterate on that with an agent: it's gonna inevitably destroy your formating, overwrite some of your edited content, and you can't even have a nice line by line diff like you'd have when you work with a simple text format like md. Building a nice collaborative markdown editor to the level where it competes with gdoc in popularity, at least in software engineering circle, would be the answer. Same with sheets. Some stripped version, which is as close as just "csv editor with some better visuals" would be much more ai-friendly
Comment on Hacker News · 3 direct repliesApple created IWork: Pages, Numbers, Keynote. Google created Workspaces with Docs, Sheets, Slides. Open source options like LibreOffice and OpenOffice exist. Google is the only one that has managed to take any significant market share from Microsoft. I don't think Anthropic has the focus to follow it through.
Comment on Hacker News · 1 direct repliesAlthough Claude could build your anything-app or host your design, Anthropic must solve some trust problems. Ppl still use alternative software because running a business or permanently hosting your backlog on an artifact that someone one-shot prompt build in 20 mins is scary. Do you trust that this artifact link will be stable and reliable for an IRS audit or could a disgruntled employee edit it to hurt the company? What was in their claude.md when they built it?
Comment on Hacker NewsSmart move for Anthropic. They've embedded into businesses and are now aiming at being the Google Workspace equivalent. Next step, domains and email? Also this differs from Claude design imo - which was too token heavy and not easy enough for a human to manipulate without prompting. Here, the human and agent user have a similar level of control.
Comment on Hacker NewsI guess this is what's supposed to be their moat: Owning your data. Not a bad idea. Yes, you could prompt these tools into being yourself, but once all of the org's data lives in Claude because "we already pay for the license" it'll be hard to switch model provider.
Comment on Hacker News · 1 direct replies