Code as an Artifact

As agentic LLMs increasingly write code, the traditional role of source code as the end product of software engineering is shifting—with specifications becoming the primary artifact since code can be regenerated multiple ways on demand. While some argue code will become obsolete like assembly language, the author contends that prompts and context in LLM-based development simply represent a higher level of abstraction, and programming languages will persist because they serve the essential purpose of reducing ambiguity in specifications where natural language would be interpretable differently over time.