sheetsage.co• Jan 26, 2026• 1 min read
Show HN: SheetSage – A Linter for the Most Dangerous Programming LanguageI built SheetSage because "Silent Failures" in spreadsheets are a massive unmanaged risk in finance and ops. Most tools just find broken references (#REF!), but the real killers are logical errors like a VLOOKUP defaulting to approximate match on unsorted data, returning a plausible but wrong value.The Technical Implementation:Locale aware parsing: Since Google Sheets doesn’t provide an AST for formulas, I had to build a conservative parser that tracks quotes, parens, and braces to extract function calls without getting poisoned by strings or array literals. It handles localized argument separators (, vs ;) and decimal separators (, vs .) based on the spreadsheet's locale.R1C1 Clustering: To avoid UI noise, I don't treat every cell as a unique finding. I normalize formulas using getFormulasR1C1() to identify templates that have been copied down. This allows the fix all engine to refactor thousands of cells in one batch.The systemic softcap scoring: standard penalty per thousand metrics
