We were almost there, back in the 80s.

A vice president at Symbolics, the Lisp machine company at their peak during the first AI hype cycle, once stated that it was the company's goal to put very large enterprise systems within the reach of small teams to develop, and anything smaller within the reach of a single person.

And had we learned the lessons of Lisp, we could have done it. But we live in the worst timeline where we offset the work saved with ever worse processes and abstractions. Hell, to your point, we've added static edit-compile-run cycles to dynamic, somewhat Lisp-like languages (JavaScript)! And today we cry out "Save us, O machines! Save us from the slop we produced that threatens to make software development a near-impossible, frustrating, expensive process!" And the machines answer our cry by generating more slop.