> It sounds like Karen did a valuable service to the company. She combined a technical skill set with her domain knowledge to create a system that was so successful that the company now depends on it. Cleaning up the technical debt seems like a task that's well worth the cost.

The technical debt here was solved by creating a complex Excel worksheet. The sheet is the solution.

For small companies where these Excel monsters get created, it is the #1 best way (read - cheapest) to solve technical debt, which, before Excel, was probably a bunch of arcane manual processes that took 5x as long with worse accuracy.

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dalibenothmen 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Thank you for your comment.Totally get what you’re saying and yeah, that’s a solid take. My main point was more about what happens next when those "Excel-as-solution" systems grow beyond their original scope and start needing maintenance, collaboration, or scale. That’s where things can get tricky. But I completely agree Excel often is the hero in the early stages.

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jdauriemma 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Good point, though not all spreadsheets are created equal. Some get quite unmanageable, and that can be a productivity bottleneck over time (unless you're not really adding new use cases)

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Ezhik 2 days ago | parent [-]

Maybe the real problem to solve is not killing Excel but providing a pathway for load-bearing Excel sheets to grow into full applications, development practices and all.

	▲	jdauriemma 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I feel like this is doable with a good LLM-assisted coding tool, but it's just a hunch.
	▲	antisthenes a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I think the hardest part here is UI. With Excel you get no-code immediate UI feedback in the cells. Most people will use an Excel sheet as an array or a dataframe.