The Language I Program in is English

I’ve been spending a lot of time with Cursor lately, and it has been an enlightening experience. The introduction of LLM-powered code assistants in the most significant change to software engineering I have ever seen in my career to date. I imagine this must be similar to what it was like when C was first introduced; that new language allowed developers to express their software is a much more natural format than other languages of the day.

Using Cursor’s code assistant, I now can write software using English instead of Python or Swift or Rust, etc. The language my software gets rendered in still has the classic syntactic strictness necessary to be interpreted by a CPU instruction set, but the language it gets written in is far more natural than it ever was before.

Now I can write a data structure by describing it: “Create an OpenAI API client that uses AsyncHTTPClient from the Swift NIO project. Include a suite of unit tests using the Swift Testing framework. The client must be compatible with other providers and not restricted to api.openai.com exclusively.” This description gets turned into a fully functional class, test suite, and sample usage.

Of course, I still have to be able to read the output, understand it, and own it as if it were my own product. Coding assistants cannot take responsibility for the code they write; that responsibility remains with the human who instructed the assistant. Now, the decision to write a project in Python, or Rust, or Swift, or Go comes down to features and functionality offered by the programming environment, and not just “what language am I most familiar with right now”.