That might be true for large dev teams with an established culture. But a lot of development is happening in different settings - solo projects, small teams, weekend side-projects, personal tools crafting, quick POC coding, etc. Not all software is a complex product that needs to be sold and maintained. One thing that I always loved about being a developer is that you can create any custom piece of software you need for yourself – even if it's for a single-time task - and don't care about releasing/supporting corner cases/other users.

In almost all these cases, development process is a mix of coding & discovering, updating the mental model of the code on the go. It almost never starts with docs, spec or tests. Some projects are good for TDD, but some don't even need it.

And even for these use-cases, using AI coding agents changes the game here. Now it does really matter to first describe the idea, put it into spec, and verbalize everything in your head that you think will matter for the project.

Nowadays, the hottest programming language is English, indeed.