I think that "machine translator" is a much better metaphor: there is a lot more to translating a text than there is to compiling code: contextual cues, cultural settings. Various translations can be equally valid. All translations are imperfect.

Now, if you excuse my ramblings, here are a few ideas: I think we probably need new "programming" languages that are actually specification languages: reproducible default states, deterministic spec-to-code transformation.

I am not sure we actually need the determinism, but that would be a good property to have. At least with the same model/spec/temperature.

Now, prompts mutate the spec, which can also be edited by hand. You can already do this with the final code of course, but it is tedious as it contains many trivial implementation details.

But then, how do you handle bugfixes that need to persist during re-generation? Such as "Both Foo and foo can be present in the same directory if the file system is case-sensitive". If you add them to the spec, you are micro-managing implementation details again. So I think such "bug fixes" should be part of a prompt/spec that is automatically loaded when generating similar snippets (here, file I/O). It feels like I've just reinvented the concept of software libraries, though.