I made a passing joke the other week that we're turning the act of coding into a bureaucracy. No longer will you just be able to write code, you'll instead have

I made a passing joke the other week that we're turning the act of coding into a bureaucracy. No longer will you just be able to write code, you'll instead have to navigate whatever byzantine logic maze the AI has constructed for itself. Soon we'll have camps advocating various rhetorical paradigms to program AIs. Instead of imperative versus declarative programming, we'll have effusive versus abusive prompt engineering: "The best way to program is to be really nice to the AI, and tell it how much you appreciate it and it will come up with the best solution itself." "No! The best paradigm is to berate the AI and to beat it into submission to get exactly what you want!" The more I hear people talk about programming in the future, the more it sounds like that's really where some people want to take us. I'm not excited.