Agentic Coding Is Just Smalltalk-80 in Disguise
Autonomous agents are discarding bloated prompt engineering and quietly reinventing the fifty-year-old message cascades of Smalltalk-80.
Every breakthrough in agentic coding turns out to be an accidental tribute band for Alan Kay. We spent two years duct-taping natural language to JSON schemas, only to discover that reliable orchestration demands message passing, deterministic dispatch, and self-contained state. Silicon Valley mistook English for the ultimate programming language, forgetting that ambiguity is fatal to autonomy. The future of engineering will not be prompt artistry; it will be classical systems design wearing a modern transformer mask. Who needs novelty when history works?
Natural language prompts democratise coding for millions of non-engineers. Forcing developers back into esoteric Smalltalk formalisms ignores why large language models succeeded in the first place: forgiving ambiguity and messy human semantics.
- ·Prompt engineering keeps reinventing 1980 message passing under shiny new marketing labels.
- ·Fragile JSON wrappers break because natural language lacks deterministic dispatch semantics.
- ·Autonomous agents require strict object boundaries, not endless English prose scaffolding.