> software engineering is more or less solved

But the example you give is of a terminal for which there are copius examples in open source code. How hard is it really for a pattern matching machine to do that?

If I was doing it I would start by forking an existing repo and I might even say then that "software engineering is more or less solved since the open source revolution"

But I don't work on things like that.

Pretty much every software problem we work on breaks down into steps that are solved in prior art.

Even if it weren't, if you're capable of explaining the context and constraints of your problem, then a modern LLM with effort=high will generally come up with a solution that's worth starting with because it's well-reasoned.

Moreover, you can start with the solution and then course-correct based on future information because refactoring is trivial with an LLM, yet human projects often ratchet into a local optimum because refactoring is too expensive.

Finally, I don't think "it's been built before" does as much work as it seems. I didn't fork a project. The LLMs reasoned about how to build the project from scratch using trade-offs that made sense for my needs, and they made reasoned deviations from kitty, xterm, and co.