The Next Programming Language Is English

In this episode, we're joined by Cornelia Davis, Developer Advocate at Temporal and a longtime software architect who has spent decades helping shape modern cloud-native systems. We explore how programming has evolved from assembly language to cloud-native architectures, and why AI is forcing us to rethink software development once again. Cornelia argues that natural language is becoming a new programming abstraction, while durable execution may be the missing layer that makes AI agents reliable in production. The conversation dives into probabilistic software, long-running AI agents, MCP tasks, human-in-the-loop workflows, durable timers, distributed systems, and why developers may no longer need to think about infrastructure the way they once did. Cornelia Davis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corneliadavis Demetrios: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkm Temporal: https://temporal.io Timestamps [00:00] AI Programming Abstractions [00:52] Abstraction Evolution in Programming [04:05] Text to SQL Evolution [10:08] Compensations for Natural Language [12:13] Durable MCP in AI [18:34] Streaming Session Explanation [21:31] Batch Processes with Tasks [29:29] Complexity Relocation in Systems [33:10] Complexity Relocation in Dev [36:36] Programming Model Shifts