Perhaps but at least when you are directing a junior developer, even if badly, you'll eventually get a non-junior developer on the other side. With an AI agent, you'll get ... what?
With current models, you're right, there will be nothing to show for the effort except the code itself.
I suspect that will change sooner or later. Models will be cultivated over time the way we cultivate full-time employees now, with an acquired awareness of what they're building, new skills picked up in the process, and insight into how the larger system works.
There's a long-running instance of the model on the provider that's allocated to my organisation? Or are you thinking more of a server-side memory system, similar to the (currently very fallible) ones like Honcho and Mem0?
What happens when my org stops paying that provider? Do I get to take the now senior agent with me to the next provider? Does the provider have to delete it (and all that learning is lost forever)? Does that now become a free agent that can be hired by the next organisation like an employee (one that probably doesn't know how to keep industry secrets to itself)?
Beats me, I haven't thought it through any further than that. But it seems obvious that the combination of a vast-but-static bag of weights and a tiny, ephemeral context has limited value, and will eventually be looked back upon as a transitional form.
Karpathy's notion of a self-maintained wiki may suggest a direction for work in that area. As he points out ( https://gist.github.com/karpathy/442a6bf555914893e9891c11519... ) this is basically the latest of several attempts at implementing Vannevar Bush's "Memex" concept. I think it will find application in some form at organization-wide scope.
If the trend towards centralization holds, then yes, who gets to own and maintain the state in a stateful AI model is indeed going to be a big question. I hope it doesn't hold.