I've been experimenting with Cucumber lately and I think it starts to make more sense now because you can write the .feature files first and have an LLM write the unit test code that interprets them. So you're actually writing English language specifications, with just enough mandatory syntax to enable some useful tooling like unit test reports and IDE navigation, but not so much that it's hard to learn.

But with respect to SMEs reading/writing them, I think we need to be realistic here. That concept of an SME died out a long time ago. How many projects still have business analysts on them? The idea that you have SMEs writing or even reading requirements, handing them off to an architect who hands a spec off to an army of programmers is an IBM era idea.

What we've seen over time as coding got easier is a blurring and compression of all these different roles into one super role: the Developer. Modern "full stack" developers are expected to be subject matter experts, coders, architects, UI designers, testers, and perhaps also know how to deploy their software and run it in production. Heck, a significant number are also expected to learn how to run a business and do fund raising from investors!

Historically, all these things were totally different roles and people. But even predating LLMs we were designing better developer tools which took away much of the manpower requirements, freeing up the time of people who were once full time programmers to take over the other roles.

And this coincided with a cultural shift where most people decided they did not want to be in charge of a software project at almost any cost. Software projects fail in mysterious ways that to non-technical people seem random and uncontrollable. Much better to outsource it or use a SaaS even if you lose flexibility, than experience the career death of being an executive responsible for a failed software project.

With the exit of SMEs and BAs stage right, developers had to step in to fill the gaps by both taking on the commercial risks themselves (bootstrapped SaaS) and also learning the subject they're trying to automate to the same depth as a genuine SME.

With LLMs making all of this stuff far easier still, I don't see any reversal of this trend. The successful SaaS solopreneur is the archetypical meta-competent man well known from the Victorian era, someone who has mastered many different domains, AI assisted or not. He will use languages at whatever level of abstraction make sense. Sometimes that will be English, sometimes code, sometimes reading and sometimes writing. But all the tools will be designed for that one type of person, not specialised roles.