HACKER Q&A
📣 Gshaheen

Is AI the New Spreadsheet?


Spreadsheets became and still are prolific for individuals and teams to create simple “apps.”

I wonder how much of that is moving over to things like cowork or codex type apps.

Personally, and anecdotally, my spreadsheet use has dropped immensely since starting to use these tools.

Thoughts?

  👤 mrhottakes Accepted Answer ✓
Deterministic tools are very useful for people that need a single answer that is verifiably correct (or at least wrong in a way that follows a deterministic process).

Plus, very few orgs are letting employees run up cloud spend bills to replace spreadsheets.

👤 bediger4000
No. It's more like Windows NT in 1994: managers and CxO's love it as they've been privately promised that it can rid them of a substantial percentage of those arrogant programmers, and buyers and other corporate agents love it since they can standardize on something, and they don't have to deal with more than one or two vendors.

Current AI also has some similarities to NFTs, in that a lot of dubious people, who have never shown any technical ability before are pushing it pretty damn hard on technical grounds.

👤 anywheretop
Today’s AI is undoubtedly far more powerful and consequential than technologies like Excel were in their time. It is still difficult to predict how profoundly AI will transform humanity because we are living through that transformation right now. We will probably have to wait until sometime in the future before we can accurately evaluate its true impact.