Right, I'm sympathetic to the idea that LLMs facilitate the creation of software that people previously weren't willing to pay for, but then kind of by definition that's not going to have a big topline economic impact.

Well, we don't know - that's capturing 2 scenarios: software that whose impact is low as reflected by lack of investment and legitimately useful improvements that just weren't valued (fix slow code, reduce errors and increase uptime, address security concerns) because the cost was not appreciated / papered over by patches / company hasn't been bitten yet

Why did you add that "weren't willing to pay for" condition?

Most of the software I replaced was software I was paying for (iStat Menus, Wispr Flow, Synology/Unraid). That I was paying for a project I could trivially take on with AI was one of the main incentives to do it.