The Real Backend Is a Spreadsheet — and Your Agent Just Got Write Access
Ask an engineer where their company's business logic lives and they'll point at a Git repository. Ask the finance team, the ops team, or the sales team, and the honest answer is a file called pricing_model_v7_FINAL_final.xlsx. The pricing formulas, the headcount plan, the commission calculations, the month-end reconciliation macros — the operational core of most companies runs on Excel and Google Sheets. It has no types, no tests, no code review, and no deploy pipeline. It is production infrastructure maintained like a napkin sketch.
For thirty years this mostly worked, because the only things reading and writing those files were humans — slow, cautious, and equipped with an intuition for "that number looks wrong." That era just ended. MCP servers for Google Sheets and Excel now expose full create-read-update-delete access as first-class agent tools, and every agent platform ships a spreadsheet connector because that's where the customers' data actually is. We have connected the fastest writers ever built to the most fragile production system ever deployed, and most teams did it in an afternoon without a single design review.
