[spinningslate]

Well yes - at least as things currently stand. It's interesting to me not for what it is right now, but what the trend might be. The extremes are probably something like:

1. Damp squib, goes nowhere. In 3 years' time it's all forgotten about

2. Replaces every software engineer on the planet, and we all just talk to Hal for our every need.

Either extreme seems reasonably unlikely. So the big question is: what are the plausible outcomes in the middle? Selfishly, I'd be delighted if a virtual assistant would help with the mechanical dreariness of keeping type definitions consistent between front and back end, ensuring API definitions are similarly consistent, update interface definitions when implementing classes were changed (and vice-versa), etc.

That's the positive interpretation obviously. Given the optimism of the "read-write web" morphed into the dystopian mess that is social media, I don't doubt my optimistic aspirations will be off the mark.

Actually, on second thoughts, maybe I'd rather not know how it's going to turn out...