>They were talking about a system that compiles natural language into machine code. They weren’t talking about a system that autonomously gathers requirements, decides what frameworks to use, searches the web to look up error messages, iterates on ideas, etc… these things are so different from “natural language maps to machine code” that I don’t think we’re going to have a useful discussion if you think “I tell the computer what I want” is the only aspect of this worth looking at.

This confuses two things still:

People wanting to have natural language to machine code via AI, just AI that was implemented the way they thought was achievable then (symbolic AI).

People wanting to have natural language style programming language, similar to later AppleScript or some 4GL languages.

Natural language programming, or natural language processing, as it was called, was tied to the first, and the AI research of the time, from the beginning:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing

So, yeah, they didn't have LLMs, but they pretty much understood such a program or "compiler" would need to understand world facts and natural language to even work.