When AI Stops Writing Code for Humans My predicted shift from human-readable to machine-native code, and what it means for every language you've ever loved You're watching an AI assistant write Python. Clean variable names. Helpful comments. Logical structure. It looks like something a senior developer would produce on a good day. Now ask yourself: who is that code for? Not the machine. The machine doesn't care about your variable names. It doesn't read your comments. It executes compiled instructions, and all those thoughtful abstractions exist for exactly one reason: so a human can read them later. The entire history of programming languages is a story of making machines comprehensible to people--allowing us to formalize the algorithm for a task in a way that we can understand it later when we wish to make changes. COBOL reads like English on purpose. Python's whitespace forces readability. Every language you've ever used is a translation layer between what humans think and what machines do.…