Programming as Theory Building (and What 2026 Might Demand)
You’re reading part 3 of a three-part essay. I believe it has never been more exciting to be a software developer than it is right now — and this series explores why.
One of my all-time favorite articles is “Programming as Theory Building”^4 by Peter Naur. Naur’s fundamental argument is that programming is concerned with building a theory — or a shared mental model of how a given system works. Here, critical knowledge about the system exists in the minds of the people who created it. Can code agents build this kind of theory? Not really. We say that agents think, know things, reason, and do deep research — but that is merely our own projection and use of words to grasp the inner workings of LLMs.
In the end, I am still very positive towards code agents and their abilities. For now, we still have:
AI + Human Intelligence > AI alone
So, I use code agents to accelerate development while keeping the human touch in the loop for greater confidence/reliability.
I am fortunate to work for a company Eksponent where I have access to many different LLMs, making it easy to experiment and compare models. Quite often, I use multiple models in collaboration: one model helps me create a plan, another implements it, and a third writes test cases. I also have colleagues who are interested in exploring agentic software development and sharing knowledge about it. I feel privileged.
What will 2026 bring? Currently, I notice increasing discussion about context engineering, which seems like a promising direction to explore — perhaps in combination with deeper human thinking about the problem before simply writing a prompt. Hopefully this can help avoid chaos and too much complexity.
Disclaimer: I wrote the text and Gemini Nano Banana generated the background image.
4: https://doi.org/10.1016/0165-6074(85)90032-8
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