My dad was a salesman in the late ’80s and early ’90s who, in today’s terms, was completely spreadsheet-pilled. Story goes, at a national conference for his company’s concrete products manufacturer, someone asked why they couldn’t provide a spreadsheet to calculate exactly how many blocks a project needed. The presenters said they’d tried to solve it, but hadn’t succeeded.
That’s when someone rose to speak, saying: “If it’s not possible, then how do you explain how this guy…” points at Dad “…was able to do exactly that?”
Dad actually started out as the owner / manager of a sign business. He saw clearly how the burdening desktop publishing movement was primed to encroach on his profits, so he bought a Kaypro 2000 to embrace the change.
He ended up exiting the business, but not before he wrapped his head around the contraptions of automatic calculations with the earliest spreadsheets— the kind of click-clack skills you teach yourself over long sessions over an emerald green cursor in the glow of a CRT monitor.
An analogy
The arrival of spreadsheets is considered the first killer application that led to exponential growth: VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3, SuperCalc, and Quattro Pro and myriad of competing products all sprung up over a decade. That is nothing like the compressed timeline of today, where LLM model releases are at an electric pace: in the space of just one week seeing the kind of advances it took decades in previous generations.
That one week in March is known as the AI Avalanch, where no less than twelve (12!) AI models dropped. So imagine twelve social media giants just pop up one day, and each of them got all the world signed up for each of them. What’s more, all those new users push their status updates to the other software giants as well.
The equivalent of status updates in coding is a “commit” and those are on pace to reach 14 billion of them this year compared to 1 billion last year. This exploded because AI code became far more dependable; sort of as if everyone had a robot constantly updating friends and family at every somewhat notable happenstance.
So a 14x explosion of coding activity that we can see in the form of commits, which will only keep rising. Crazy part is, the software that accounts for roughly 4% of them? It’s software was only just released in May 2025: Claude Code.
Social media never went this viral.
Back to the Future
When spreadsheets entered the scene in 1979, anyone with a query and a keyboard could do financial operations. Yet it didn’t put accountants out of work, it just made simpler accounting processes far more accessible. They didn’t just make business managers more productive, it created a new category of capabilities. Instead of mere calculation, what became more valuable was judgement and supervision around the work.
The floor rose. And the ceiling rose with it.
How do schools respond to being so behind?
The rate of change is challenging society’s patience, and educators are feeling the resulting pressure point as well. It seems like new tooling becomes available faster than we are able to even learn that the previous generation even existed. In hindsight, at least my Dad had the luxury of being able to pace himself.
Is the best how question really how to respond, or how to tame it, or how to digest this technology? Those are the queries we always reach for first, but their defensive posture speaks for itself.
Rather, the right how question is how to get teachers to become problem-pilled. That’s the evergreen growth skill schools can nurture in their professionals. It’s about getting to the rooftop, reading the terrain, and advancing together.