> The problem is if you don’t understand the root cause, you’ll at best feed the LLM a list of symptoms

Today maybe.

When Cloudflare has an outage does the CEO need to know the root cause though? If he just assigns some engineers to investigate, fix and report back to him – what's the issue with that?

Assuming you agree with my analogy, can you explain what it is that you feel an agent or group of agents assigned to an engineering tasks could not do that a human can? And if can't do it today, why do you believe it wouldn't able to do it in the future?

Are we just disagreeing about timelines here or whether humans have some magical quality which algorithms and AI can never capture?

I feel like it's reasonable to disagree on timelines. It's quite unreasonable to assume human coders are special.