I don’t remember much fear that spreadsheets were going to replace programmers. What I remember more was a kind of simmering contempt for them, though time may be sanding the edges off that memory.
From the IT side, spreadsheets and later spreadmarts were a completely understandable headache.
The business needed solutions, and IT often couldn’t deliver fast enough. A lot of that was structural: IT was usually treated as a cost center, underfunded, and forced through layers of process and overengineering. So even small things could take too long, cost too much, and come wrapped in too much ceremony.
So the business used spreadsheets because they were powerful, flexible, and already there.
The real problem came later. Business process, business data, and domain knowledge ended up trapped inside undocumented spreadsheets living on someone’s PC. Out of sight, out of mind, and effectively unmaintained.
Then Joe retired, quit, or got laid off, and suddenly some weird but critical business function stopped working because Joe always did it and it lived on Joe’s machine.
That was the nightmare. The same IT group that didn’t have the time or resources to meet the need in the first place now had to reverse engineer a giant kludgy spreadsheet and somehow turn it into something supportable.
Which is part of why the current AI moment feels familiar to me. Not because AI is the same thing as a spreadsheet, but because the adoption pressure comes from the same places: businesses want to save money, people need to get their work done, and they will reach for whatever is powerful, available, and fast enough.
And just like with spreadsheets, some of what gets built this way will be genuinely useful, some of it will become invisible infrastructure, and some of it will turn into a future headache for whoever has to untangle it later.
I don’t think the lesson from spreadsheets was that end-user tools replaced professional software. It was that when the official path is too slow, too expensive, or too disconnected from the real need, people route around it. AI looks to me like the same pattern on a much larger scale. The hype says panacea. Reality will probably be messier.