alt Hacker News"Following this hypothesis, what C did to assembler, what Java did to C, what Javascript/Python/Perl did to Java, now LLM agents are doing to all programming languages."
This is not an appropriate analogy, at least not right now.
Code Agents are generating code from prompts, in that sense the metaphor is correct. However Agents then read the code and it becomes input and they generate more code. This was never the case for compilers, an LLM used in this sense is strictly not a compiler because it is not cyclic and not directional.
I think it's appropriate in terms of the results rather than the process; the bigger problem I see is that programming languages are designed to be completely unambiguous, whereas human language is not ("Go to the shop and buy one box of eggs, and if they have carrots, buy three") so we're transitioning from exactly specifying what we want the software to do, to tying ourselves in knots trying to specify it exactly, while a machine tries to disambiguate our request. I bet lawyers would make good vibe coders.