In February 2025, Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and former director of artificial intelligence at Tesla, made a memorable remark :
“The hottest new programming language is English.”
It sounds a lot like a new myth Silicon Valley has just invented.
But if “giving computers instructions in human language” could eliminate engineers and software engineering, then the discipline should have been declared finished back in 1959. That was the year Grace Hopper championed COBOL . The promise she made to the business world was remarkably similar to today’s vibe coding:
“Managers would only need to write sentences in everyday English, and the system would run automatically.”
Six decades later, we still need engineers. Because programming languages and syntax were never an imposing wall blocking development; they were more like a safety net. Removing parentheses, types, and syntax does not make the complexity disappear along with them. You simply have to put the logic back into natural language using more—and more cumbersome—adjectives and clauses.
Computers can finally understand English and Chinese, but the cost of thinking has not been discounted as a result.
Natural language makes programming easier, but it does not make thinking easier.