>no one should be debugging

He literally said those exact words out loud from the audience during a job talk.

And yeah, the total aim and the reason why he might just blurt that out is because a lot of the frustration and esprit de corps of programming is held up in writing software that's more a guess about behavior than something provably correct. Perhaps we all ought to be writing provably correct software and never debugging as a result. We don't. But perhaps we ought to. We don't.

Is control via natural language a doomed effort? Perhaps, but I'd be cautious rather than confident about predicting that.