Here in SF I talk to people all day who see this as a feature, not a bug, and that's the persona Claude Code and Codex are selling to.

It started being proposed as a thought experiment "why should we care about the files if AI is going to do the edits", then as Opus got better and the hype built up, the rhetorical part of that dropped and now there are plenty of people who swear they don't write code at all anymore and don't see why anyone would.

I think we're in a feedback loop caused by the fact you can totally get away with not writing code anymore for some reasonably complex topics. But that doesn't account for the long term maintainability of the result, and it doesn't account for people who think they're not writing code, but are relying heavily on the fact we haven't fully magicked away the actual code. They're watching the agents like a hawk, doing small bits and pieces at a time, hitting stop when it starts thinking about the wrong thing, etc.

My worry is the market taking the wrong lesson out of the trends and prematurely trying to force the agent-first future well before the tools or the people are ready.