There have been a lot of attempts to move more of programming to end-users instead of professional developer over the years. Spreadsheets are interesting because they were a massively successful version of this and because of course we are living through the latest wave (AI/vibe coding).
For ...
For those of you around when spreadsheets were taking off, what was it like? Was there fear that they would eradicate the need for professionally built software? Were there people who brushed them off as just toys?
Comments
By allinonetools_ 2026-03-155:14 Spreadsheets did not replace programmers, they mostly changed who could build small solutions. A lot of quick calculations and internal tools moved to spreadsheets, while developers focused more on building systems around them. In many teams it actually increased the need for proper software later on.
By apothegm 2026-03-152:58 They addressed completely different use cases.
Most software development was either huge custom business systems or packaged desktop software complex enough to warrant fifty-dollar or more price tags at a time when $50 was worth a lot more than it is today.
Programming was in some ways far more and in other ways far less accessible to get into, and there weren’t software developers around every corner. Someone who could _use_ a computer with a modicum of fluency was a rarity, let alone someone who could program one.
It would be like asking whether accountants should fear for their jobs after the invention of the calculator.
Even MS Access (introduced something like a decade later) or the roughly equivalent FileMaker Pro were ways to build custom software for companies that would never have been able to afford the SWE team to build something from scratch. (And Access in particular tended to be wielded by people unfamiliar with relational database normalization in ways that made it a bit of a time-delayed footgun.)
Access is probably the best analogy for vibe coding in that sense — really good for building something small and custom for someone who couldn’t code it from scratch themselves. Yet not really suited for building large, complex production-grade (let alone “enterprise-grade”) systems — you could try, but you would come to regret it soon enough.
The main difference being that somehow a lot of software companies have managed to fall for the idea that it doesn’t have such limitations.
