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Comment by sevensor

20 days ago

Access is not as dead as you might hope. The long tail of internal tools written with Access continues to shamble along. I had to figure out how to dump MDB files on Windows last year for just this reason. As an industry I think we often fail to grasp how much outsider art there is, in the form of internal departmental tools.

LLM coding is going to create a cambrian explosion of these tools. It’s going to be very interesting to see the remnants of this wave 30 years down the line.

One of the key questions here - will LLM coding decrease the proliferation of app-specific Excel files (by for example accelerating and simplifying Excel-to-webapp conversion) or would result in an opposite outcome by making feasible managing even orders of magnitude more of those disparate Excel files :)

  • I wouldn’t bet against cramming more and more business processes into Excel. The guy who was copying cells from one workbook to another yesterday, tomorrow can have a single mega-workbook with all the macros more or less deconflicted.