> we need people that understand the thing that is being maintained We do for a lot of software today, but not all of it. I think in a year we'll need them for

> we need people that understand the thing that is being maintained We do for a lot of software today, but not all of it. I think in a year we'll need them for less, but I'm not sure how much less. This claim isn't supported or justified by talking about natural language versus formal language. For the last 50 years or so the people shaping a lot of software in the most important ways are often using only natural language. The product manager doesn't understand the code today. They write PRDs and Jira tickets and comments in Slack, and software comes out. They have people test the software, report bugs, more software comes out. Eventually they decide its close enough to their vision to ship, without ever understanding or looking at any of the code. They can do that with human programmers or agent programmers. The former holds up better in larger systems, but I don't see any evidence for the proposition that this is due to the limits of natural language.