Yeah that's a real good point. I focused a lot on the short term issues of agentic slop but you're right the long term impact of this is going to be staggering.
That mental model is ultimately the more important part for the long-term health of the project. Coding is more an activity of communication between people; having an artifact that tells the computer what to do is almost an incidental side-effect of successful communication.
100%. Something I wanted to touch on in my post but cut because I couldn't weave it in well was more on the relationship with "The Problem" and "The Code". Pre-AI coding acted as a forcing function for the problem context. It's really hard to effectively build software without understanding what you're ultimately driving towards. With agentic coding we're stripping that forcing function out.
Institutional knowledge is already something that's been hard to quantify and value by C-suites and now you're ripping out the crucial mechanism for building that.
I see a lot of memes with people being like "in 5 years we're just gonna press yes and not understand what the agent is doing" and I keep thinking "why do people think this is funny?"