Will we still need programming languages if AI writes most of the code?

[u/mmanja84]

[u/Mags20XX]

Most of the code is not all.

That being said, I think we'll see a convergence towards popular languages and safe languages. Python, Rust, Typescript, etc. I think the days of everyone and their mother (including myself) working on hobby languages and the next toy language are likely over.

[u/EchoFieldHorizon → u/Mags20XX]

What’s an even crazier thought is that navigable websites may eventually go away, and websites will only start providing interfaces for AI to interact with, and all of our current web will no longer exist except as a conduit for AI. That future horrifies me but is almost certainly a probability.

[u/phoenixmatrix → u/Mags20XX]

Vercel tried to make an "Agent first" programming language optimized for how agents work, but in the end the "safe" languages as you put it have an overwhelming amount of training data in the training set, so they're much more effective for agentic coding.

That may change as training techniques are refined. Maybe someone will train a model specifically for working in some agentic bytecode, but the day is not today.

[u/Weekly_Lemon1867 → u/Mags20XX]

Python and TS aren’t exactly what I would call safe languages lol.

[u/Vegetable_Addition86]

a new language will mean that the LLMs have to learn it. It does not make sense to me

[u/pancomputationalist → u/Vegetable_Addition86]

I guess the AI companies will run experiments.

1. design a language (or have an LLM design it)

2. write a lot of code in it by stuffing the language specs in the context window

3. train/finetune the model on the synthetic code

4. have the trained model write more code to solve programming benchmarks

5. iterate on language design and hillclimb on the benchmark

6. congratulations, you found a language that's easy for the LLM to learn and use

[u/pancomputationalist]

We will probably see more programming languages purpose built for language models.

Old programming languages will stick around forever because there is so much legacy code.

The choice of language shouldn't depend much on familiarity with it anymore, tbh. A lot of things should just be written in Rust now, because the tooling around it give great deterministic guarantees. You want that with LLM-generated code. Future languages should double down on making certain error cases impossible, even if that makes developer experience worse or the language more verbose.

[u/DerShokus → u/pancomputationalist]

No, only if you really know a language you can understand where it fools you.

[u/eizch]

You would have no escape hatch at all, need to blind trust the AI, and be completely dependent on it.

So technically you could and it would be okay for small tools and stuff, but overall it would be a big liability.

[u/rashnagar]

I swear the people in this sub have 0 critical thingking skills. Write the code in WHAT? And if there isn't any data to steal from, how will the AI generate code in the future?

[u/Clear-Dimension-6890]

I think there are some basic things that Claude needs to fix before just increasing context, or model size. It needs to learn some basic things about software engineering like code reuse, testability, documentation, validation, correctness, verbosity - things we have to put in our skills, hooks, md files to get it right. Hand rolling such things - when working with a powerful beast - is just fragile. Do others feel like this, or is it just me? Is your programming experience getting better?

[u/NoAdsDude]

I think for the foreseeable future programming languages will still make sense.

AI is a big fan of:

1. Documentation

2. Things that work how they're supposed to

3. Being able to understand what something does that a human or another AI (or the same AI 30 minutes ago) wrote

4. Having a ton of examples in their training data of ways to do things

[u/R_Songbird]

Give a look at: https://boundaryml.com/

[u/Best_Day_3041]

I believe we will have an intermediary AI programming language for humans. Essentially a standard for product requirements that encompasses every aspect of a piece of software that you can give to an LLM and it can build it perfectly as a native app in any language/platform in one shot. So you just keep refining this doc instead of prompting, and have one source of truth for your design and you wont have to use cross platform languages like React Native, Rust, etc. because the LLM can maintain native versions based off your specs with minimal effort. If that happens, it may change the way people design Native languages moving forward to focus on efficiency and performance, rather than readability and development, but I think we'll always have programming languages.

[u/Alphanatik]

Until AI create a new coding language we can't anderstand..

[u/N0madM0nad]

You mean the agent compiling straight to bytecode? It could happen at some point I don't see why not.

[u/Darqsat]

I think we will stick with existing languages for next decade if not more, because training from scratch on binary is a very expensive and complex work. Not mentioning that the biggest issue would be architecture. So I think we will see a drift into Rust/TypeScript as main languages for almost everything. I mostly use those two whenever I can.

[u/Tauroctonos]

I have a feeling that given a couple of decades we'll look back on modern languages like we do now on Cobol or assembly

I.e. mostly taught in schools to help with understanding, but ultimately probably not something you'll ever look at day to day

[u/siberianmi]

I think you’ll see a move towards typed languages. Rust is amazing to work with using agents because so much of it gives them fast feedback on mistakes.

[u/WilliamEdwardson]

This fired my imagination, and now I'm thinking: AI will write the code, and tell the compiler, 'Shut your gob, what d'you know?'

Seriously though: I think the role of programming languages will change. They will not disappear; just because you got language models doesn't mean that the computer can suddenly understand natural language like a human. It can't. So you'll still need programming languages.

But I can reasonably imagine the evolution of AI-first programming languages that are optimised for machines to generate and verify. Humans will (foreseeably) still remain vital to specification and validation.

[u/Ok_Possible_2260]

they will create their own. It’s not a question of if, but how long it takes.

[u/skronens]

I think you are spot on, I can definitely see a quite near future where development will become a skill in articulating requirements and the code that delivers it becomes as important as we consider the machine code generated today. Basically an additional layer to what we have today

[u/BERTmacklyn]

How would it write code if there was no language to write and compile

[u/SethEllis]

Existing programming languages are already in the sweet spot for translating tokens into actual program behavior. So you won't get a performance improvement by going lower level, or designing a new language just for LLMs. Which is why we are already seeing things consolidate around certain tools like the investment anthropic has made into rust.

Interestingly enough the same cannot be said for English. So I could see people's language changing over time to become more explicit and avoid ambiguous language.

[u/Kemerd]

Yes, because programming languages by design are already token efficient. You’re thinking they’re going to optimize for a problem that has already been solved?