There are definitely automated dev systems, of which an LLM is a part. The remaining part may be called a 'harness' or whatever. The quality of the generated software is another matter.

If the AI is not good enough, then don't fire the devs. If/when the devs are no longer needed, I don't see why the need would return later, that was my point.

A harness like Claude Code does not turn an LLM into a software developer.

If that was the case companies could just have their project managers managing Claude Code instead of developers, and they would immediately realize that using Claude Code to develop software is just as complex and geeky as it ever was - nothing changed in that regard.

A harness and a bunch of skills is just the new "think step by step" prompting technique. Don't just let the LLM rip and write a bunch of code, but try to get it to think before coding, avoid things like churning the code base for no reason, and generally try to prompt it to behave more like a developer not an LLM. Except it still is an LLM.

A coding agent is really not much different to a chat "agent" in this regard. You've got the base LLM then a system prompt trying to steer it to behave in a certain way, always suggest "next step", keep to a consistent persona, etc. None of this actually makes the LLM any smarter or turns it into a brilliant conversationalist, anymore than the coding agent giving the LLM a system prompt magically turns it into a software developer.