I take your point, and I concur. I picked "middlemen" to highlight some assumptions we make about ourselves, that the programs exist for their own purpose and n

I take your point, and I concur. I picked "middlemen" to highlight some assumptions we make about ourselves, that the programs exist for their own purpose and not as means to an end. But you're correct that this is a necessary thing, not something that we've captured. At our best, we do exactly what you say: take things that people say and make them more concrete and specific. This is something I think a lot of programmers don't realize: it is fundamentally a human job. We are "in the middle" between the people (with their vague, hazy ideas) and the computer (with its very simplistic binary model of the world). When we think that our jobs are all about computers, we're setting ourselves up to be replaced. Not by AI, but by plain old software written once and then left there.