I think what is different from the assembly -> C analogy is that we are now non-deterministic. You could almost argue that going to C increased human understanding, as we could express problems in a more human way. And while agents enable us to express ourselves in natural language, we lost the determinism along the way.
I think with more agentic code comes the responsibility of more documentation, more architectural understanding.
Perhaps agentic code is the equivalent to a C compiler outputting what previously was the domain of assembly engineers.
I think what is different from the assembly -> C analogy is that we are now non-deterministic. You could almost argue that going to C increased human understanding, as we could express problems in a more human way. And while agents enable us to express ourselves in natural language, we lost the determinism along the way.
What agentic workflows change is that we can now produce code that never had a theory behind it to begin with.
That's exactly right: there's no because there.