[vineyardmike]

Before LLMs (and still now) a human will often write a doc explaining the desired UX and user journeys that a product needs to support. That doc gets provided to engineers to build.

I agree - at least with the thesis - that the more we "encode" the fuzzy ideas (as translated by an engineer) into the codebase the better. This isn't the same thing as an "English compiler". It'd be closer to the git commit messages, understanding why a change was happening, and what product decisions and compromises were being designed against.

[grey-area]

I think I’d rather have the why in English and the how in code, i.e. keep both, keeping just the English instructions is nowhere near enough to fully specify what was done and why. These things evolve as they are produced and English is too fuzzy.