And yet, the specification of almost every program in existence was communicated in natural language. At least between the customer and developer.

This argument makes the implicit assumption that humans are uniquely able to convert between this "customer wants a program that solves their problem" level and compileable code. That was a reasonable thing to believe in 1978, but is not a reasonable thing to believe in 2026.

Once an employer asked me to automatize his work, so the task that he did in weeks was done in seconds. I made a gui that showed every step he did manually, so he could check and understand every step. And yet he became confused and lost track of what the program was doing. He frequently asked me the very concepts he taught me so I could do the program. I just implemented exactly his specification. I didn't created any new concept, but as soon as the task became automatized, he stopped understanding.