It is obvious what the parent poster is saying, and it's substantively wrong. Give someone a table saw and they're essentially no closer to being a woodworker. It's tricky to use a table saw (trickier still to use it safely).

These tool analogies are self-soothing for programmers who see agents is simple tools of their trade. But the point of articles like this is that AI agents are more like spreadsheets --- only more so. They're devices that allow normal people without training or aptitude to do things with computers that only programmers were doing before. They displace programmers.

In that sense, the closest physical analogy to a coding agent is probably a 3D printer. But: a really good 3D printer, into which hundreds of billions of dollars had been invested entirely for the purpose of making the printer work weirdly well even for people who have no interest in the different kidns of filament spools.