Raw LLM Responses

So, I've been making this analogy for like 2 years now, and I've had a lot of people tell me I'm wrong because obviously AI is just going to keep getting better and better and take over more of what developers do in a way that Excel couldn't for accountants. I think there are two really important things to understand about what Excel did - whether you think they're analogous or not: 1. Excel automated like 98% of the time that accountants spent doing *bookkeeping*. Before Excel, companies would have a bunch of people whose job was to literally write down and track financial transactions by hand. If you go back before computers, this was all done in pen and paper. Like, I worked with people who were old enough to have done manual bookkeeping in their lifetimes. But bookkeeping was not, is not, never has been the value-driving contribution of accounting. Bookkeeping was a necessary evil - it was the base level of what you needed to do to make sure that you were keeping accurate track of your money. Where accounting has always delivered value is in 1) taxes, and 2) identifying financial patterns/trends/outliers that are relevant to business operations. So this is where things get intersting - before Excel, let's say bookkeeping was like 75% of the man hours spent in an accounting department. So, if Excel is automating 98% of the 75%, you would conclude that Excel has now eliminated the need for like 73% of all accountants, right? That would be a HUGE disruption. And yet, that is not at all what happened. Why? 2. Because bookkeeping was 75% of what accounting *used* to do, not 75% of what accounting *could* do. And that is exactly what happened. Today, accountants spend 0.01% of their time on bookkeeping, and yet the accounting profession has blown up in terms of importance. Because now every accountant is largely focused on activities that deliver value.