It has nothing to do with determinism. It's the difference between nearly perfectly but not quite perfectly translating between rigorously specified formal languages and translating an ambiguous natural language specification into a formal one.

The first is a purely mechanical process, the second is not and requires thousands of decisions that can go either way.

And that’s no different than human developers

The difference is that a human is that a human can reason about their code changes to a much higher degree than an AI can. If you don't think this is true and you think we're working with AGI, why would you bother architecting anything all or building in any guard rails. Why not just feed the AI the text of the contract your working from and let it rip.

You give way too much credit to the average mid level ticket taker. And again, why do I care how the code does it as long as it meets the functional and none functional requirements?

Because in a real application with real users all of the functional and non-functional requirements aren't documented anywhere but in the code.

If only a coding agent had access to your code…

You realize that coding agents aren’t AGI right? They aren’t capable of reasoning about a code changes impact on anything other than their immediate goal to anywhere near the level even a terrible human programmer is. That why we have the agentic workflow in the first place. They absolutely require guardrails.

Claude will absolutely change anything that’s not bolted to the floor. If you’ve used it on legacy software with users or if you reviewed the output you’d see this.