The Excel Moment: Why Every Profession That Absorbed a Transformative Tool Followed the Same Pattern

Someone recently asked in a LinkedIn thread whether AI tools are truly changing software engineering or just making existing work faster. The comment thread was more interesting than the question itself — hundreds of experienced developers, torn between "this changes everything" and "this changes nothing." What struck me is that both camps were right, and neither seemed to realize it. We've seen this exact debate before, in professions that already absorbed their version of this moment. The pattern has three acts, not two — and the third one is the part nobody wants to talk about. Act One: The Tool Arrives In 1979, Dan Bricklin released VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet for personal computers. Before VisiCalc, accounting was a physical process. Rows and columns in paper ledgers, pencil in one hand, calculator in the other. Changing a single number meant recalculating everything that depended on it — by hand. Bricklin later recalled showing VisiCalc to accountants and watching