Comment by theshrike79

Excel is the largest development platform because it's installed on (pretty much) every corporate PC by default, without having to ask Legal, Security, Finance or IT for approval. If we count Google Sheets as "Excel", the people who don't have access to it are a rounding error, if that.

BUT

With the arrival of Agentic AI, I've literally seen complete non-coders (copywriter, marketing artist, and a Designer) whip up tooling for themselves that saves them literal days of work every week.

Things that would've been a Big Project in the company, requiring the aforementioned holy quadruple's approval along with tying up precious dev + project management hours.

In the end they're "just" simple tools, simulating or simplifying different processes, but in a way they specifically need it done. All built from scratch in the time it would've taken us to have the requisite meetings for writing the spec for the application and allocating the resources needed - "We have time for this on our team backlock in about 6 months..."

None of them are perfect code, some of them are downright horrible if you look under the hood. But on the other hand they run fully locally, don't touch any external APIs, they just work with the data already on their laptops, but more efficiently than the commercial tools (or Excel).

Zapier, N8N and the like _kinda_ gave people this power, by combining different APIs into workflows. But I personally haven't seen this kind of results from them.