What the author is describing is the logical conclusion of the Bitter Lesson applied to software development. To quote the essay: "We have to learn the bitter lesson that building in how we think we think does not work in the long run." The author of this article correctly points out that a lot of what goes into programming language design is a model of how humans think, and a lot of the abstractions are there to make it easier for humans to reason about code. That's not to say that abstraction isn't useful for machines, but I think the bitter lesson would say that it's better in the long run to let the machine figure out the best abstractions through search, and let humans think in the way they're used to thinking: in natural language.
Now personally I don't think this ultimate vibe-coding paradigm is just around the corner, but it does seem that it's the direction we're heading and I think this article does a good job of explaining why.
> let humans think in the way they're used to thinking: in natural language
Writing a program means stating unambiguously what you want, but natural language is ambiguous which is why legalese exists.
So you need to have an unambiguous source language for what's end up being executed by your machine (which is what programming languages are), otherwise you have no way of knowing if the machine does what you want it to do.
Of course you can use an LLM to translate natural language to unambiguous language, but at the end of the day you must read the generated language because that's the only way to dispel the fundamental ambiguity of the natural language.
I saw a webcomic ten years ago where a project manager discussing the future automation of programmer's jobs:
PM: “In the future, there will be no developers, just project manager. We will just give the machines very complete and precise specifications and it will make the software on its own. Without needing you”.
Dev: “You know how we call a "very complete and precise specification"? It's called code”.
Now personally I don't think this ultimate vibe-coding paradigm is just around the corner, but it does seem that it's the direction we're heading and I think this article does a good job of explaining why.