prediction re the end of spreadsheets AI code gen means that anything that is currently modeled as a spreadsheet is better modeled in code. You get all the advantages of software - libraries, open source, AI, all the complexity and expressiveness. think about what spreadsheets actually are: they're business logic that's trapped in a grid. Pricing models, financial forecasts, inventory trackers, marketing attribution - these are all fundamentally *programs* that we've been writing in the worst possible IDE. No version control, no testing, no modularity. Just a fragile web of cell references that breaks when someone inserts a row. The only reason spreadsheets won is that the barrier to writing real software was too high. A finance analyst could learn =VLOOKUP in an afternoon but couldn't learn Python in a month. AI code gen flips that equation completely. Now the same analyst describes what they want in plain English, and gets a real application - with a database, a UI, error handling, the works. The marginal effort to go from "spreadsheet" to "software" just collapsed to near zero. this is a massive unlock. There are ~1 billion spreadsheet users worldwide. Most of them are building janky software without realizing it. When even 10% of those use cases migrate to actual code, you get an explosion of new micro-applications that look nothing like traditional software. Internal tools that used to live in a shared Google Sheet now become real products. The "shadow IT" spreadsheet that runs half the company's operations finally gets proper infrastructure. The interesting second-order effect: the spreadsheet was the great equalizer that let non-technical people build things. AI code gen is the *next* great equalizer, but the ceiling is 100x higher. We're about to see what happens when a billion knowledge workers can build real software.

reading the replies -- a lotta folks hate this prediction! A lot of folks can't imagine programming the logic/variables/inputs without the spreadsheet grid paradigm my primary counterpoint: - much complaining is from people trained on keyboard shortcuts in Windows Excel on Thinkpads during their glorious banking days, swearing that they'll never switch to anything else. Late adopter normie finance bros. Soon to be disrupted my actual counterpoints: - programming itself has changed its UX many many times. Punchcards, typing into files, IDEs, and now LLM coding harnesses. Spreadsheets are not the only way to encode business logic -- there are better ways, while gaining all the power of software - the grid UX might remain in some form, but might be more of a display. Just as you code in Codex/Claude but then still pull up a webpage. Or maybe you'll have a grid as a DB but then build apps on top, but still want a querying UI for the data - LLMs will make going between logic in code and logic in spreadsheets interchangeable. So maybe you'll edit in a grid but then hit "deploy" and it'll build a webapp in the cloud. And just as we have VLOOKUP() they'll be LLM() that can encode AI logic - anyone who works with software knows its infinitely better and more expressive and more powerful. AI code gen is a blessing for all the non-technical excel wizards who can now take their work to the next level