Martin Odersky – Keynote: The End of Programming? [video]

Am I mistaken in thinking that events like the Hugging Face attack are not actually relevant in the context of what he's speaking about in that video? The video is about methods of putting guard rails on agentic development without having to inspect every single line of code. But Hugging Face/Medicare/etc were intrusions: they had nothing to do with writing code. Perhaps I have missed something here though.

Perhaps also I have missed something when I say that although this capability concept seems kind of cool on paper, who's writing the contracts to which the agents must adhere? Will they not just end up writing the contracts for themselves, in the most permissive way, slapping themselves on the back and continuing? It feels like turtles all the way up/down.

Hearing a traditional Odersky drone about how the latest language feature his lab has built into Scala just happens to be exactly the tool everyone has been missing from their AI agents somehow establishes a bridge across these crazy last few years.

I enjoyed this talk very much, although I suspect that the capability work in Scala preceded this new agental AI world and just happens to apply, rather than being formed by it. Like a solution that found its problem.

But his approach seems very pragmatic, not judging whether or not agental development practices are good or bad, but rather considering how we can address the issues they create at the level that he works at: language design. No doubt his work in practically realising these ideas will contribute to the evolution of language and systems design.

The fact that Odersky's akka.io is all-in on AI needed to be censored.