Software engineering is different from other engineering disciplines in that the most explicit spec of the thing you’re building is the actual thing itself.

When you want to build a bridge you finalize all the blueprints and then someone goes and actually pours concrete, in software the blueprint is the code, and the code is also the bridge.

However there are different levels of abstraction for writing specs and code is just the most explicit form. With LLMs more of our time can be spent in those higher levels of abstraction and free us from work that is often repetitive and mundane.

I think the (distant) future of software engineering is not code writing but mostly requirements writing, and so it makes sense to build frameworks, “IDEs”, etc. around this new form of “programming”.

I don’t know if ACAI is the right one but the direction is interesting.