Alexander Shevchenko is the head of applied research at Ramp, where he leads Ramp Labs – the team behind Ramp Sheets and a steady stream of public AI engineering experiments. Ramp Sheets started as an internal process mining tool that turned Loom videos of accountants into Markov diagrams, before evolving into the agentic spreadsheet editor that shipped in November. In this conversation, Alex walks through the architecture under the hood, why Ramp biases the agent toward Excel formulas over Python code gen, and two recent Labs experiments: Latent Briefing and a user-steerable revival of Golden Gate Claude.
We also discuss:
- Under the hood of Ramp Sheets
- Inspect, Ramp's internal coding agent, and the self-improving monitor loop it powers
- Why finance professionals rejected code gen as too "black box"
- Why Anthropic models tend to excel at agentic spreadsheet manipulation
- The case for putting the agent outside the sandbox, not inside it
- The Loom-to-Markov-diagram process mining pipeline
- RLMs and how subagents can share memory in latent space
- Latent Briefing and KV-cache communication between subagents
- Reviving Golden Gate Claude with steering vectors on Gemma
Referenced:
Where to find Alex:
Where to find Harrison:
Where to find LangChain:
Send feedback or questions to maxagency@langchain.dev
Timestamps:
(00:00) Introduction
(01:13) The origin of Ramp Sheets
(02:27) The Loom-to-Markov-diagram process mining pipeline
(04:28) Why code gen approaches felt too "black box" to finance
(06:13) Meeting finance where they already are: inside the spreadsheet
(09:08) How far process mining got them
(10:31 )Text descriptions and Graphviz DAGs as output
(12:41) Under the hood of Ramp Sheets
(14:52) Why the agent uses Python only as an escape hatch
(15:47) Why Anthropic models excel at agentic spreadsheet manipulation
(17:12) Frankensteining the OpenAI Agents SDK
(17:43) The Ramp Sheets UX and fast vs. expert mode
(19:58) Agent in a sandbox vs. agent with a sandbox
(21:55) Vibe evals with expert humans
(23:40) Inspect, the internal coding agent
(24:13) The self-monitoring loop and auto-PRs
(28:01) Other wacky experiments on Sheets
(28:43) Memory experiments that didn't pan out
(31:16) Latent Briefing and KV-cache subagent communication
(35:13) Reviving Golden Gate Claude
(37:47) Contrastive pairs and steering vectors
(39:47) Picking the right layers in Gemma
(41:37) What Ramp Labs looks for when hiring
