With LLMs taking the world, the prediction “What comes after serverless? Conversational Programming!” becomes a reality. It is interesting that even in 1967 Marvin Minsky understood the possibility of a 2-way conversation between programmer and computer, where the program is written in collaboration:

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Quote from swardley: “When you think about the act of writing an application today, it is often an act of gluing together a few discrete component services with some code in a utility run-time environment such as Lambda. Well … at least, it should be. Even in this serverless world, the act of programming still requires you to think about what component services need to be glued together. That means you have to break down the problem into components, find component services that match, determine what is missing and hence what you will need to build, then build it and glue it all together. That is still a lot of work to be done and to be blunt, it’s work that can mostly be automated and achieved through some form of intelligent compiler. This leads us to conversational programming.

The rapid evolution of large language models towards more of a commodity service will enable more conversational styles of programming. Systems like ChatGPT are stochastic parrots i.e. they are great at producing content based upon “statistical” analysis of huge volumes of similar content. But helping you write code is not enough. What any conversational system should be doing is watching as you write code and interrupting with a polite “excuse me, you don’t need to build that … just use this”.

We’re still waiting for those conversational programming environments to fully form but we’re getting close. The technology is there (i.e. large language models), the concept is there (i.e. conversational programming) and the attitude is there (i.e engineers getting swamped by complexity). All the factors needed are in place, it’s only a question of how quickly this evolves and which actor launches first at the “right” level of abstraction.