Code is still there, but humans are done dealing with it. We're at a higher level of abstraction now. LLMs are like compilers, operating at a higher level. Nobody programs assembly language any more, much less machine language, even though the machine language is still down there in the end.
They certainly do, and I can't really follow the analogy you are building.
> We're at a higher level of abstraction now.
To me, an abstraction higher than a programming language would be natural language or some DSL that approximates it.
At the moment, I don't think most people using LLMs are reading paragraphs to maintain code. And LLMs aren't producing code in natural language.
That isn't abstraction over language, it is an abstraction over your computer use to make the code in language. If anything, you are abstracting yourself away.
Furthermore, if I am following you, you are basically saying, you have to make a call to a (free or paid) model to explain your code every time you want to alter it.
I don't know how insane that sounds to most people, but to me, it sounds bat-shit.
I've worked in 3 different WYSIWYG editors for web and desktop applications over the years, lightly contributed to a handful of other open-source editors, and spent plenty of time building my own personal editors from scratch (and am currently using gpt-5 to fix my own human bugs in a rewrite of the Notebook.ai text editor that I re-re-implemented ~8 years ago).
Editors are incredibly complex and require domain knowledge to guide agents toward the correct architecture and implementation (and away from the usual naive pitfalls), but in my experience the latest models reason about and implement features/changes just fine.
Doesn't have to. The LLM will do it! We're done with code, aren't we?
Code is still there, but humans are done dealing with it. We're at a higher level of abstraction now. LLMs are like compilers, operating at a higher level. Nobody programs assembly language any more, much less machine language, even though the machine language is still down there in the end.
> Nobody programs assembly language
They certainly do, and I can't really follow the analogy you are building.
> We're at a higher level of abstraction now.
To me, an abstraction higher than a programming language would be natural language or some DSL that approximates it.
At the moment, I don't think most people using LLMs are reading paragraphs to maintain code. And LLMs aren't producing code in natural language.
That isn't abstraction over language, it is an abstraction over your computer use to make the code in language. If anything, you are abstracting yourself away.
Furthermore, if I am following you, you are basically saying, you have to make a call to a (free or paid) model to explain your code every time you want to alter it.
I don't know how insane that sounds to most people, but to me, it sounds bat-shit.
I've worked in 3 different WYSIWYG editors for web and desktop applications over the years, lightly contributed to a handful of other open-source editors, and spent plenty of time building my own personal editors from scratch (and am currently using gpt-5 to fix my own human bugs in a rewrite of the Notebook.ai text editor that I re-re-implemented ~8 years ago).
Editors are incredibly complex and require domain knowledge to guide agents toward the correct architecture and implementation (and away from the usual naive pitfalls), but in my experience the latest models reason about and implement features/changes just fine.