u/yugiton

I can't really wrap my head around why analysts would ever use spreadsheets over Python with Pandas/Polars these days. With coding agents, you can literally do everything and far more than what you can do in Excel. The argument of explainability/intuitiveness of spreadsheets made sense before agents got so good that you can now literally one-shot a custom app that lets you interact with your project in whatever way you want. AI coding environments like Cursor have the Canvas feature, which essentially provides the embedded mini-app capability, and I expect this to become more feature-rich over time.

What's the future of spreadsheets?

Everyone wants to build sophisticated AI systems (because of FOMO), but I feel like there are far more basic "data discoverability" issues that need to be solved first before we even start talking about using complex agentic automation. Am I wrong to think that, instead of building AIs that work on bad, fragmented data, we should focus on making the data more usable first -- by both people and agents? It's like we're obsessed with improving engine efficiency while having it consume unrefined crude oil.

So, the question is: do you feel the same way that we should kind of take a step back with regard to what we focus on? Do you likewise consider the issue to be as significant? How is your org solving this?

I work as a data engineer at a bank. My team is supposed to be the one centralizing data collection and management for the whole org.

I've realized that there's this tension between centralizing and decentralizing data work -- whether we, as the org-level data team, should implement a flow or expect the analysts to implement and own the flow, while we just provide the underlying infra. Over time, I started to strongly lean towards more decentralization. Not because I'm lazy, but because centralization should be about being focused on the absolute smallest denominator, which is smaller than most orgs assume -- especially now when you have no clue what an optimal stack is gonna look like in 6 months. My impression was always that we should be doing 50% less, but doing it 100% better.

(I have similar opinions when it comes to business applications more generally -- the centralized team should provide the infra to deploy, but teams that need an app should build and maintain it)

Are you seeing the same trend of decentralization?