The difference is that in the brain there's no real separation between hardware and software, so I'm your analogy, we also have the equivalent of the source code, but just maybe not the environment configuration needed to get it to run (nor would we at this stage have sufficient compute to fully run it).
Any man made hardware is rather too organized to be good analogy here. But we have better alternatives than came along recently - LLMs or any kind of AI models as a matter of fact. Personally I would use analogy of "try running a prompt locally and then explain what really happened inside in terms of CPU operations" :)
