IMHO, I need both text streams and metaformat. YMMV.
Just like GUIs should but usually are not gracefully, responsively scaled to user expertise, the developer experience should but usually are not gracefully, responsively scaled to the appropriate level of scaffolding to fit for purpose to the requirements defining the problem space at hand. I need more representations and abstractions, not less.
Metaformats drag in their own logistical long tail that in many use cases are wildly heavyweight for small problems. Demanding metaformats or APIs everywhere and The Only Option trades off against the REPL-like accessibility of lesser scaffolding. API-first comes with its own non-trivial balls of string; version control between caller and callee, argument parsing between versions, impedance mismatch to the kind of generative CLI's you envision, and against other API interfaces, etc.
The current unstructured primitives on the CLI, composable into structured primitives presenting as microservices or similar functions landing into a more DevOps-style landscape, etc. represents a pretty flexible toolbox that helps mitigate some of the risks in Big Design Up Front efforts that structure tends to emerge in my experience. I think of it as REPL-in-the-large.
As I gained experience I've come to appreciate and tolerate the ragged edge uncouthness of real world solutions, and lose a lot of my fanatical puritanism that veered into astronaut architecture.
Just like GUIs should but usually are not gracefully, responsively scaled to user expertise, the developer experience should but usually are not gracefully, responsively scaled to the appropriate level of scaffolding to fit for purpose to the requirements defining the problem space at hand. I need more representations and abstractions, not less.
Metaformats drag in their own logistical long tail that in many use cases are wildly heavyweight for small problems. Demanding metaformats or APIs everywhere and The Only Option trades off against the REPL-like accessibility of lesser scaffolding. API-first comes with its own non-trivial balls of string; version control between caller and callee, argument parsing between versions, impedance mismatch to the kind of generative CLI's you envision, and against other API interfaces, etc.
The current unstructured primitives on the CLI, composable into structured primitives presenting as microservices or similar functions landing into a more DevOps-style landscape, etc. represents a pretty flexible toolbox that helps mitigate some of the risks in Big Design Up Front efforts that structure tends to emerge in my experience. I think of it as REPL-in-the-large.
As I gained experience I've come to appreciate and tolerate the ragged edge uncouthness of real world solutions, and lose a lot of my fanatical puritanism that veered into astronaut architecture.