How will we write code in the future?

Sometimes I reminisce about my first days working as a programmer, sitting with a cup of coffee in front of the open Eclipse IDE, clicking through files, sorting through functions, and writing code. However, over a few decades, this process of writing code itself has remained virtually unchanged. The only differences might be the wider choice of IDEs and the popularity of dark mode.

Today, the popularization of AI and the emergence of GPT and other LLMs are changing familiar things. For instance, Amazon's CodeWhisperer and GitHub Copilot, developed on its basis, offered something new to programmers. Now, in your IDE, you can discuss your code with GPT, ask it to find bugs, etc. Cool, but this is only the first attempt to apply LLMs.

// Don't worry, in my fantasies, programmers will always be needed, and robots won't replace us all.

In my opinion, the industry is moving towards simplification, which might eventually lead to a more visual approach to coding itself.

Just as we have seen a leap from low-level to high-level programming, we will soon see a similar leap. Just as today a “class” or “new” words are translated/compiled into a machine instruction, soon a visual block containing text prompts and a bunch of settings might be converted by an LLM into the code of a final program.

Something similar has already begun to happen, for example, ComfyUI, using visual blocks, allows connecting different models and extensions to the models and generating images or videos with enviable flexibility. Why can't a similar approach be adopted in coding?

I think soon more programmers will start drawing parallels between such tools as Comfy UI or AWS CloudFormation, and similar tools, and we will see the emergence of new extensions and plugins for IDEs, eventually leading to a full-fledged IDE relying on LLMs and diagrams.

Maybe something similar is already happening in the back alleys of GitHub and I just haven't discovered it yet...

What do you think about the future of programming and AI? Will the IT community make another leap to an even higher level of programming in the next two years?