Everything you said is why I don’t agree with the idea that “everyone will be writing their own apps.”
Can’t wait for a world full of apps as janky as most spreadsheets (or Access or FileMaker databases)
Can’t wait for a world full of apps as janky as most spreadsheets (or Access or FileMaker databases)
Also the OP has much about the programmatic components, but Excel is also an interface. The front end of an unofficial corporate app. And people know (they think) how to use it.
I just listened to a demo of an insurance industry SaaS that isn’t yet public. Goal to move many things out of spreadsheets. Had AI agents built in and all sorts of bells and whistles. But the screens were chaos. I immediately thought it was just too “complicated” to switch a person off the busy/messy system they know - Excel.
Everyone will be writing apps. Almost every app will be as janky as possible and people will just take the jank as the normal thing and get used to it and working around it, just like they did when every company started using electron and fake mobile apps that are wrapped buggy webpages.
With fast updates that changes every feature across updates, breaking everything and people accepting as the norm.
It's already happening:
- you can see Show HN post making it to the front page full vibecoded with as much jank as possible and the all the comments praising it and not questionning all the jank.
- I've seen it in some popular open source projects when after updates existing feature started to break constantly. The whole thing is ai coded up to the handling of bug reports and feature request and have Claude as co-commiter. I've looked in the internet to see the perception no one is complaining about it
- same at work, managers accepting slop AI solutions that are wrong at so many levels simply because it's fast and complain about the symptoms months down the line without questionning the AI part.
This was already the case even before generative AI