Comment by dioptre

Hi I'm Andy, Cofounder & CTO @ Sourcetable.

We use a heavily modified licensed engine that prevents us from open sourcing everything (for now). We have plans to open source our agentic/plugin framework, and other parts of the system. We also have a strong ethos of contributing back to open source where we can (contributed back to Arrow, DuckDB etc.).

I'd also add that while everyone knows how to use and work with spreadsheets, we also provide a SQL layer on top that you can use to query data sources as an advanced user (we developed a nomenclature to work within sheets/across sheets/files/our data-warehouse). This allows more technical users to work side-by-side in the same environment as non-technical users without crossing pythonic or reporting boundaries.

On top of this, the AI assistant can answer most of the questions you might have of all this data.

I think as ML gets more sophisticated, we will in general need to be less technical. The "tooling" might even disappear, but we will still need something to communicate important data centric decisions. Whether you like it or not spreadsheets are the foundation of human research and operations and have been for thousands of years, and I feel humanity will need less complicated "tools" and we will keep to our roots.