By some measures, the software industry is in a state where steel production was maybe in 1880-1900. By the end of the 19. century we were quite able to produce largish steel constructions but the Siemens-Martin furnace aka Open Hearth Furnace was new https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-hearth_furnace and allowed us to produce large quantities of quality steel. At the same time the industrial processes were still quite imprecise and manual, people got hurt regularly during work. The LLMs we use today are an improvement in the process, just like the Open Hearth Furnace, but there are much quicker, more precise technologies that we don't yet know about/ don't use in the mainstream. (The electric arc furnace, electro-slag remelting, vacuum arc remelting, oxygen converter process would be equivalent advancements to the OHF for example.)

So where is the meaning in all this?

We can look at the steel making revolution and try to learn from it. Software is in most places, so is steel. In my experience a steel mill employee generally gets paid. There is the dignity in struggle, because the work tends to be demanding. Perhaps we will have machines working on the standardized components for us to put together after QA/ conformance testing to form a larger system. Maybe software engineering will really be more like work planning or a machine engineering studio. What I am confident about is that we will get more standardization and everything will get a lot more complex, yet we will have tools to cope with that.