Stefan, I share many of your sentiments regarding the slow progress toward these essential features and basic needs. And I think your prediction concerning possible vibe replacements on the horizon is more than a definite maybe. It will almost certainly happen, and sooner than we think.
However, when it does, a tiny segment of today’s customers will find safe harbor in custom AI-crafted systems built to mimic many aspects of Coda and overcome several of the limitations that we have been waiting for years to be addressed. This is not to suggest that you or any of us are too insignificant for Superhuman to care. It is simply an attribute of a growth market whose technical foundation is presently unable to accommodate the many avenues of use cases that, while known and understood, fall into an increasingly narrow band of users.
If you look back to 2019 and compare the application requirements that Coda addressed at that time with the apps we are planning for 2026, there are significant differences. This was a harsh transitory period when data exploded and app complexity soared.
- Overall Growth: From 33 ZB in 2018 to 181 ZB in 2025, representing a ~448% increase over 7 years, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of approximately 23.6%.
- Peak YoY Surge: 2020 saw the highest growth (56.59%), accelerated by pandemic-driven digital adoption (e.g., remote work, streaming).
- Personal Data Context: Estimates suggest ~40-50% of the datasphere is personal data in recent years, with shares slightly declining as enterprise and IoT data rise, but absolute personal volumes still exploding (e.g., ~60-90 ZB in 2025). For privacy implications, only ~10-20% of data is typically retained long-term.
It’s not surprising that Coda was caught off guard regarding table size capabilities. Most companies in the low/no-code space struggled with this.
Data size is one of several pressure points, but it is a big one. AI was another big one. We didn’t know what we didn’t know, and to a large extent, this remains true in late 2025.
The small segment that finds a better way [ironically] using AI to displace/replace Coda and other tools was precisely the part of the market I wrote about a year ago. Coda is rapidly becoming less relevant to a slice of its original customers, and they will likely move on. But Coda’s customer base will also grow massively for different customer segments.