Eh.

It's "not software engineering" but neither was what most people writing code did before LLMs.

> Without a clear architectural pathway / direction, that code is just useless. It's not tech debt. It's just a bunch of random strings

This is pretty clearly false. It's a bunch of random strings that you can compile and run to do what you want. It's more akin to a black box. A compiled closed source dependency.

Agreed. I never considered myself an "engineer". Honestly just a regular code monkey. Software Engineer was just my job title. Folks higher up the ladder did engineer software. You know what? It sucked. Was always broken, we were always patching, we never saw around corners. But hey - they software engineered it.