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by tacostakohashi 102 days ago
Spreadsheets became popular in the 80s, before PCs were ubiquitous and cheap. Computers cost in the order of 5 to 10 thousand dollars, with lots of incompatible systems. Spreadsheets were a killer app that drove adoption and grew the market, so I'd say on balance it was positive for programmers and software generally.

AI comes at quite a different time, when tech adoption was already pretty mature / saturated to start with.