> Code always was, it's supposed to be malleable
Yes, well-designed code is malleable to an extent when coding by hand, but even then it's an order of magnitude more rigid than when working with agents (and real-world code often ossifies, as you pointed out). Malleability comes not only from the possibility of change but also from the speed.
> It's the data you generate with that code that's your asset. You can always rewrite the code.
I like that perspective, but "you can always rewrite the code" almost never happens in real life for complex projects, and when it does, it's a huge undertaking that takes many months or even years. Malleable code makes that much more feasible, I'd argue.
Rigid implies you are trying to change something into something else in a controlled way. Eg a refactoring that does nothing but enable for a future feature. Agents does not change code to refactor anything, they write code to solve the new feature directly. And if you are good at prompting they might overwrite code that exist so that the end result looks like a refactoring. But no clay was reshaped.