That suggests a straightforward mapping between context -> program. Maybe for trivial programs but I don’t see how you can argue that for sufficiently complex programs.

Reasoning models perform better than non-reasoning models because they’re able to refine their code in multiple steps. That allows any part of the program to influence any other part of the program, not just from start -> end.

Human thinking serves a similar purpose. Basically intelligence needs to be able to backtrack if you want better performance.