I hear the analogy often that the move from assembly to high level languages is similar to the rise in abstraction from those languages to coding with agents. There's some truth to this, but one big difference. Compiling a high level language into assembly is deterministic, while prompting to generate code is not. Giving up working in assembler doesn't introduce much risk from a verification perspective and it's arguably safer to work in the higher level abstraction. Prompting to produce code on the other hand is non-deterministic and creates a huge verification problem as to whether the agent actually did what you intended. This is the big reason we can't just "code review" prompts and are still looking for ways to make sure the code itself is right. This is all kind of obvious -- there's a reason English isn't a programming language. But it's useful to keep in mind as we make analogies to prior shifts in development.