Spreadsheets replaced developers for that kind of work, while simultaneously enabling multiple magnitudes more work of that type to be performed.

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ozim 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I do agree, that’s like my go to thought.

Citizen developers were already there doing Excel. I have seen basically full fledged applications in Excel since I was in high school which was 25 years ago already.

	▲	tacostakohashi 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If anything, there were a bunch of low barrier to entry software development options like HyperCard, MS Access, Visual Basic, Delphi, 4GLs etc. around in the 90s, that went away. It feels like programming then got a lot harder with internet stuff that brought client-server challenges, web frontends, cross platform UI and build challenges, mobile apps, tablets, etc... all bringing in elaborate frameworks and build systems and dependency hell to manage and move complexity around. With that context, it seems like the AI experience / productivity boost people are having is almost like a regression back to the mean and just cutting through some of the layers of complexity that had built up over the years.

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65 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And I would argue speadsheets still created more developers. Analytics teams need developers to put that data somewhere, to transform it for certain formats, to load that data from a source so they can create spreadsheets from it.

So now instead of one developer lost and one analyst created, you've actually just created an analyst and kept a developer.