Comment by red_hare
8 hours ago
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.
You think prompting is here to stay? Sql has survived a long period of time. Servlets haven’t. We moved from assembly to higher languages. Flash couldn’t make it. So, im not sure for how long we will be prompting. Sure it looks great right now (just like Flash, servlets and assembly looked back then) but I think another technology will emerge that perhaps is based on promps behind the curtains but doesn’t look like the current prompting.
I would say prompting is not here to stay. It’s just temporary “tech”
Eventually we might even develop some kind of language beyond english. One more precise and formalized. This way the LLM could perfectly understand what we're saying. The LLM could produce code based on that formalized language. And Google docs is nice, but imagine some kind of editor tailored to that formalized language we create.
> The job becomes naming, describing, and instructing and then wiring those pieces together with something more akin to flow-chart programming.
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.
Can you share a link to your agent class or another one you think is good?