Show notes
In this episode, we're joined by Cornelia Davis, Developer Advocate at Temporal and a longtime software architect who has spent decades helping shape modern cloud-native systems.We explore how programming has evolved from assembly language to cloud-native architectures, and why AI is forcing us to rethink software development once again. Cornelia argues that natural language is becoming a new programming abstraction, while durable execution may be the missing layer that makes AI agents reliable in production.The conversation dives into probabilistic software, long-running AI agents, MCP tasks, human-in-the-loop workflows, durable timers, distributed systems, and why developers may no longer need to think about infrastructure the way they once did.Cornelia Davis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corneliadavisDemetrios: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkmTemporal: https://temporal.ioTimestamps[00:00] AI Programming Abstractions[00:52] Abstraction Evolution in Programming[04:05] Text to SQL Evolution[10:08] Compensations for Natural Language[12:13] Durable MCP in AI[18:34] Streaming Session Explanation[21:31] Batch Processes with Tasks[29:29] Complexity Relocation in Systems[33:10] Complexity Relocation in Dev[36:36] Programming Model Shifts
