| Right now I'm working two AI-jobs. I build agents for enterprises and I teach agent development at a university. So I'm probably too deep to see straight. But I think the future of programming is english. Agent frameworks are converging on a small set of core concepts: prompts, tools, RAG, agent-as-tool, agent handoff, and state/runcontext (an LLM-invisible KV store for sharing state across tools, sub-agents, and prompt templates). These primitives, by themselves, can cover most low-UX application business use cases. And once your tooling can be one-shotted by a coding agent, you stop writing code entirely. The job becomes naming, describing, and instructing and then wiring those pieces together with something more akin to flow-chart programming. So I think for most application development, the kind where you're solving a specific business problem, code stops being the relevant abstraction. Even Claude Code will feel too low-level for the median developer. The next IDE looks like Google Docs. |
That's precisely what peoples are bad at. If people don't grasp (even intuitively) the concept of finite state machine and the difference between states and logic, LLMs are more like a wishing well (vibes) than a code generator (tooling for engineering).
Then there's the matter of technical knowledge. Software is layers of abstraction and there's already abstraction beneath. Not knowing those will limit your problem solving capabilities.