Why "AI is just the next compiler" doesn't hold up

At a recent talk I compared AI adoption to the introduction of compilers: a new layer of abstraction that lets us work at a higher level, the same way compilers let us stop writing assembly by hand. In the hallway afterwards, a few people pushed back on that comparison. They were right to. Here's the point I should have made from the stage: agents are not deterministic, and that single difference…