Until a few months ago, domain experts who ciuldn't code would "make do" with some sort of Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet From Hell (MESFH), an unholy beast that would usually start small and then always grow up to become a shadow ERP (at best) or even the actual ERP (at worst).
The best part, of course, is that this mostly works, most of the time, for most busineses.
Now, the same domain experts -who still cannot code- will do the exact same thing, but AI will make the spreadsheet more stable (actual data modelling), more resilient (backup infra), more powerful (connect from/to anything), more ergonomic (actual views/UI), and generally more easy to iterate upon (constructive yet adversarial approach to conflicting change requests).
We have monthly presentations at my job and the business folk are really leaning into AI. The biggest win so far are them being able to generate new user experiences and get them into figma by themselves. They're able to test a design, get it into figma, generate some code, and get it in front of users without a developer or designer at all. It's not perfect but the tests show what we need to focus on vs what falls flat when put in front of users. It's very impressive and I'm proud of them.
Super interesting. I don't know why, but something about this comment made something click for me, as an "AI fatigued" engineer.
From the view you describe, it seems AI just lets you experiment faster, when all you want to do is experiment. You find product market fit easier, you empower designers more, etc. Much easier to iterate and find easy wins from alternative designs - as long as your fundamentals work!
Only problem is that you are experimenting in public, so the massive wave of new AI generated features come to the public from everywhere at once. Hence the widespread backlash.
Not to mention, the core job function when you are experimenting is different from what defines a lot of hard technical progress: creating new technologies, or foundational work that others build on, is naturally harder and slower than building e.g. CRUD services on top of an existing stack. Deep domain expertise matters for selling, deep programming expertise matters for stability. I don't know, curious where the line will end up getting drawn.
Yeah, the examples I've seen really focus on experimentation which my employers's platform is designed around. We are constantly testing changes in design and copy and hoping that we get small incremental increases in user attention. AI is really suited for these small changes and it allows us developers to build platforms specific stuff instead of working on baby tweaks. We already had a pretty good system where astute business people could tweak HTML and CSS but now their lives are even easier and they can focus on their actual job which is increasing customer sign ups and attention
> AI will make the spreadsheet more stable
Hallucinations sure make spreadsheets nice and stable.