[ModernMech]

But how do you know AI can generate programs without writing code? It can't today -- in fact the best thinking models work by writing code as part of the process. Natural intelligence requires it as well, as all our jobs are about expressing problem domains formally. So why would we expect an artificial intelligence should be able to reason about the kinds of programming problems we want them to without a formal language?

Maybe they will not be called programming languages anymore because that name was mostly incidental to the fact they were used to write programs. But formal, constructed languages are very much still needed because without them, you will struggle with abstraction, specification, setting constraints and boundaries, etc. if all you use is natural language. We invented these things for a reason!

Also the AI will have to communicate output to you, and you'll have to be sure of what it means, which is hard to do with natural language. Thus you'll still have to know how to read some form of code -- unless you're willing to be fooled by the AI through its imprecise use of natural language.