The End of Programming? (Martin Odersky, Scala Days 2026)
Martin Odersky opened Scala Days 2026 with a question he admits he can’t answer: if agents write the code and other agents review it, what are humans and programming languages still for? He doesn’t predict the future. He argues about which one we should want, and then shows a working piece of it. His group’s agent harness, which uses Scala 3’s capture checking to stop an agent from leaking secrets at compile time, won a best paper award at an ACM agentic-systems conference this spring....