I’ve been thinking — the whole productivity software industry might be a historical accident.
We built PowerPoint because people couldn’t write HTML. We built SharePoint because they couldn’t use Git. We built Excel because dataframes felt inaccessible.
Most of what’s on your laptop isn’t essential. It’s a workaround. A layer on top of something simpler. A GUI where a developer would’ve just used a text editor.
Somewhere along the way, we started treating the scaffolding as the building.
But that assumption doesn’t hold anymore.
The “missing skill” isn’t missing. I can ask an AI to commit code and push it. No terminal. I can ask it to build a presentation — which, underneath, is just structured content anyway. I can analyze data without ever opening a spreadsheet.
So what are these tools now? Maybe just training wheels that never came off.
Which raises a more interesting question — what actually matters?
Intent.
That’s all these tools ever carried. A slide is intent laid out in space. A spreadsheet is intent organized in a grid. Strip away the interface, and what’s left is just thought — expressed clearly enough for something else to act on.
So maybe the future isn’t a better set of tools.
Maybe it’s just one.
An operating system built around intent. An agent you open in the morning that already understands your work, your context, your constraints. It sees what’s blocked, what matters, what needs to move.
And then it moves it.