One of my pet hypotheses is that the top X% of Excel users vastly outperform the same bottom % of programmers in getting to usable results.

Totally agree! I know a guy whose main job is basically to be an Excel expert (nominally he works in logistics), and seeing some of his work convinced me that he's actually a programmer who uses excel as an IDE - akin to visual programming.

We should adopt the term “tabular programmers” or “tabular engineers”!

That’s not what I wrote. It’s just that in my dev work I only rarely have the need for one-off tools.

Do you not debug, optimize, analyze ...? Copilot is especially valuable for throwaway (or nearly throwaway) log parsing/analysis, for example.

I do, but I have all the software I need for that. I may use LLMs in that context, but for the actual analysis, not for generating one-off tools.

That used to be the case with me too before LLMs.

It was because writing one off tools took time and you needed it to do more for it to be worth the time.

Now a lot more are getting written because it takes a lot less effort. :-)

It just depends on the environment. Some areas get to experiment with different approaches more than others. On one extreme if I was writing yet another crud app, it's unlikely is need any such tools. On the other, when dealing with data processing/visualisation/ml, it's small experimental tools all over the place.

More like it's time to bring it back...