> That said, I think programming will largely evolve into the senior programmer defining a strategy and LLM agents or an intern/junior dev implementing the tactics.

That's basically what goog wants alphaevolve to be. Basically have domain experts give out tasks that "search a space of ideas" and come up with either novel things, improved algorithms or limits / constraints on the problem space. They say that they imagine a world where you "give it some tasks", come back later, and check on what it has produced.

As long as you can have a definition of a broad idea and some quantifiable way to sort results, this might work.