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The reports of the death of writing code by hand are greatly exaggerated. It’s cool and hip to go with the flow of what everyone else is talking about and agents are a form of compilation but there are important caveats to this.

First, compilers and higher level languages enabled us to reduce the amount of code that we write. Expressing the same program in C and assembler requires less C code. Natural languages are verbose and expressing the same idea in them compared to a programming language is often more verbose.

Second, compilers are useful because they allow us to detach from the hardware and write generic software. There isn’t really an equivalent of this at the agent layer.

It could be argued that it’s actually an inversion, since different agents produce wildly different output (counter point: different compilers often produce different output instructions from the same source).

Third, compilers struck an important balance between the operator knowing how the machine works and being able to operate on an abstraction of the machine. We get worse software the less the operator of the compiler understands the machine. This is greatly increased at the next level up.