Well it's getting philosophical. Even before AI, I would argue that the vast majority of software was meaningless. Actually the most successful software on Earth is hurting society and the environment, in exchange for profit for a few humans.

I don't know any software engineer who can say "if I was not doing what I do, society would get a little worse".

Also even before LLMs, a lot of software was already kind of semi-disposable.

You write an app, maintain it for a few years, then once the code starts getting a bit old and messy developers start advocating for writing a new version from scratch in the latest shiny language/framework and rinse/repeat.

That was already completely normal in the 2010s before LLMs in my experience, most developers don't want to maintain other people's old code and will try and manoeuvre politically to avoid it

I console myself that while the products we make are useless and probably even harmful the activity itself just represents the world Geist familiarizing itself with computation and its possibilities and thus growing richer in the process.

In the worst case.. sometimes you learn what's best by experiencing what's not.

The folk keeping Wikipedia running?

sad.