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/dpbrinkm

Temporal: https://temporal.io

Timestamps

[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