ai agents can program, in fact, in our current time with current models, i'd say they program better than most people in the industry (an industry where people were literally copying and pasting from stack overflow for years prior)

being able to program is not the only skill required to be a successful software engineer, so no ai agents cannot be software engineers

very important distinction - i personally like the radiologist example - looking at scans is a part of a radiologist job, AI can do it better than most of them, but looking at scans is a small part of the job, most of it communicating with doctors to help their patients