Status: ready-to-adapt public launch post for @bilig/headless.
Use this as the first broad technical post for Hacker News, Reddit, dev.to, a personal blog, or a project site. Adapt tone and length per channel, but keep the evidence and caveats intact.
For a Hacker News-specific submission checklist, title, first-comment draft,
and preflight, use docs/show-hn-launch-pack.md.
Title:
A headless spreadsheet engine for AI agents and Node services
Post:
I built @bilig/headless, a TypeScript spreadsheet engine for agents, Node
services, and local-first workbook automation.
The motivating problem is simple: a lot of useful business logic still lives in spreadsheet-shaped models, but most automation either drives a browser grid or reimplements formulas in ad hoc code. That is brittle for coding agents and awkward for backend services.
@bilig/headless exposes a WorkPaper API for programmatic spreadsheet work:
The repo includes a runnable external-consumer example:
git clone https://github.com/proompteng/bilig.git
cd bilig/examples/headless-workpaper
npm install
npm start
Or install the package directly:
npm install @bilig/headless
Minimal example:
import { WorkPaper } from "@bilig/headless";
const workbook = WorkPaper.buildFromSheets({
Deals: [
["Region", "Customers", "ARPA", "Revenue"],
["West", 20, 1200, "=B2*C2"],
["East", 30, 250, "=B3*C3"],
],
Summary: [
["Metric", "Value"],
["Total revenue", "=SUM(Deals!D2:D3)"],
],
});
const summary = workbook.getSheetId("Summary");
console.log(workbook.getCellValue({ sheet: summary, row: 1, col: 1 }));
Performance claims are checked in rather than left as marketing copy. The
current WorkPaper benchmark artifact records 46/46 mean wins on
scorecard-eligible comparable workloads against HyperFormula-style workloads:
38/38 public and 8/8 holdout.
That is not a blanket “faster on every p95 row” claim. The evidence note spells out what is measured, what is excluded, and where the p95 caveat still exists:
https://github.com/proompteng/bilig/blob/main/docs/headless-workpaper-benchmark-evidence.md
The project is still early infrastructure, not a finished Excel clone. Known open areas include deeper Excel formula parity, structured references, dynamic arrays, durable multiplayer sync, and more public release hardening.
Useful entry points:
Good first contributions are especially useful around formula parity fixtures, WorkPaper recipes, benchmark explanations, runnable examples, and docs that turn architecture notes into copy-pasteable code.
Title:
Show HN: bilig - a headless spreadsheet engine for agents and Node services
Text:
I built @bilig/headless, a TypeScript spreadsheet engine for programmatic
workbook automation. It runs formulas, structural edits, persistence round
trips, and validation without opening a browser grid.
The main use case is automation that needs spreadsheet semantics but should not screen-scrape Excel or Google Sheets. The repo has a runnable external-consumer example, npm package docs, and checked-in benchmark evidence against HyperFormula-style workloads.
It is early infrastructure, not a finished Excel clone. The current public
claim is 46/46 mean wins on comparable WorkPaper benchmark workloads, with a
documented p95 caveat.
Repo: https://github.com/proompteng/bilig
I built @bilig/headless, a TypeScript spreadsheet engine for Node services and
coding agents.
It gives you a WorkPaper API for formulas, structural edits, persistence, and range reads without opening a browser grid. The repo includes a runnable npm example and checked-in benchmark evidence against HyperFormula-style workloads.
Useful if you want spreadsheet-shaped business logic in code, or if an agent needs a real workbook API instead of screen scraping.
GitHub: https://github.com/proompteng/bilig npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@bilig/headless
@bilig/headless.