Ibrahim Diallo just published a piece that reads like every breathless AI startup pitch, except he's talking about Microsoft Excel. "We are entering an era of No-Code where the code was never needed in the first place," he writes, arguing that spreadsheets will replace HR departments, supply chains, and marketing teams. Why buy Salesforce when conditional formatting does the job? The whole thing is satire. But it lands because Diallo's targets deserve it.
The joke works because Excel actually is becoming a legitimate platform for building lightweight agents. Microsoft integrated Python directly into the spreadsheet grid late last year, running code on Azure servers through a partnership with Anaconda, a sector where cloud providers are fiercely competing to host these workloads. You can now call =PY() to access pandas, NumPy, scikit-learn, and Matplotlib without installing anything. Predictive models run inside workbooks. Cells can call external LLMs via API. The spreadsheet is now an execution engine, not just a recording tool.
What Diallo is actually mocking is how the AI industry talks to itself. "That's what AI hype sounds like to my ears," he admits at the end. The same language we use for foundation models, he applies to a grid of cells, and it sounds equally plausible and equally absurd AI hype sounds like to outsiders. Hacker News commenters mostly agreed. Several noted that small companies often need better Excel workflows more than they need AI agents to solve actual operational problems. The spreadsheet won't replace your AI startup. But the fact that Diallo's parody works at all says something uncomfortable about how we talk about what we're building.