This great post by Dion "English will become the most popular development language in 6 years" is worth a mull imho.
There's obviously a lot of push back on LLM's be it what they were trained on and how much energy they use. However the technology is here, and Dion poses a great question: Will natural language become the way people control their computers?
Two things resonated with me:
The reason that we see so many applications pop up with a chat side bar is a signal that we are building bridges between the computers and the humans in natural language ways.
and
Future: your English is the source, and as your computer systems improve, they can be regenerating new and improved implementations. It behooves you to invest in testing and validation in this world, but this is something that is actually really needed any way… we just sometimes get away without doing it.
I maintain a list of apps that I'm happy for people to use. I've also got a huge list of disposable apps that I've built for myself. I'm pretty certain that "natural language" as the main development language will happen at some point and as it developes millions more people will have the ability to control their compute in ways that echo how Spreadsheets enabled people to manipulate their data in their businesses.
Dion centers some of his discussion on Chat-first vs Spec-first. I agree that the Spec is important, I just don't know how this part will develop. Do we develop the spec completely up-front, or is there a chat-like assistant that accretes the spec as we develop. I'm thinking the later, I can imagine a world where we have a set of critics that attempt to objectively look at your spec and tell you what's missing or what could be developed further.