> I think it's because traditionally, software engineering was a field where you built your own primitives, then composited those, etc... so that the entire flow of data was something that you had a mental model for

Not just that, but the fact that with programming languages you can have the utmost precision to describe _how_ the problem needs to be solved _and_ you can have some degree of certainty that your directions (code) will be followed accurately.

It’s maddening to go from that to using natural language which is interpreted by a non-deterministic entity. And then having to endlessly iterate on the results with some variation of “no, do it better” or, even worse, some clever “pattern” of directing multiple agents to check each other’s work, which you’ll have to check as well eventually.