For forty years, Excel was the undisputed king of general-purpose knowledge work. It separated the savvy from the rest in every white-collar function on the planet. It became the lingua franca of finance and accounting, and then quietly colonized every domain. Entire businesses still run on spreadsheets attached to emails. […]
It will be harder to differentiate from Claude Code than it ever was to differentiate from Excel, because Claude Code is more general-purpose, more composable, more scalable, and improving every day, not at some release cycle cadence. UX is less meaningful when agent delivers outcomes. Thus, recent UX innovations are happening mostly for alleviating the pain of managing agent swarms, etc.
I recently found myself making the same comparison in a discussion with a friend who is skeptical most will have the patience to learn how to build apps with AI, or have the need to.
I’m always amazed by how much and how well the average person knows Excel — the extent they’re willing to suffer to bend the tool to their will. So many companies run on spreadsheets cobbled together in a fashion not dissimilar to vibe coding. Quite a few even use them for their personal lives (nuts, if you ask me)!