I agree that the level of abstraction will grow and LLMs will be the primary tool to write code *but* I think they will still generate code in a formal language. That formal language might be very close to a natural language, pseudo code if you will, but it will still be a formal language. That will make it much much easier to work on, collaborate on and maintain the codebase. It’s just my prediction though, I might be proven wrong shortly.

You seem to have missed this part of TFA:

> That means we no longer examine the code. Our time as engineers will be spent handling context, testing features, and iterating on them

IOW there would be no human to "work on, collaborate on and maintain the codebase" and so the premise of the article is that it might just as well emit machine code from the "source prompt", hence "LLM as compiler".

Or maybe you mean that this formal language is not for humans to handle but entirely dedicated to LLMs, for the sake of LLMs not having to reverse engineer assembly?

I think that's where the premises differ: the author seems to suggest that the assembly would be generated each time from the "source prompt"

I don't know, these all read like thought experiments built on hypothetical properties that these AI tools would somehow be bestowed upon in some future and not something grounded in any reality. IOW science fiction.