95% of the projects I've worked on have been some fairly simple permutation of ETLs, CMSs, and ops -- all of which are sufficiently constrained problem spaces that we've got good systems for them which work well without the need for Turing-complete programming languages.
But as long as we're constrained by legacy codebases, overly complex third-party APIs, and the need to maintain business models, we're not going to be able to make things as simple as we know they should be. It's not just services: I've got 100 legacy file formats on my disk, and they mostly are completely different and require different tools for no good reason.
I've wasted many months (years?) of my life figuring out how to plug the API from service X into the API for service Y and put the results on a simple webpage, with some CSS that a designer gave me. That's not the sort of thing that ought to require a Turing-complete programming language. It's almost all accidental complexity.
Someday we'll sort this all out, and then maybe we'll go on to discover some other unexplored area where we need lots of (Turing) programmers, or maybe we won't, but that's beyond the inflection point. Our next 50% barrier isn't technical, and as long as we've got artificial socioeconomic barriers in the way, I can't guess what's after that.
Most "software" needs these days are business related. Legions of engineers are just adding minute variations to the same CRUD frameworks to make slightly different products. I think the kind of programming that goes into making a CRUD startup and the kind of programming that went into making a device driver in the '80s is very, very different.
And the end result of this is what? More or less code gets written? Is there a need for more or less programmers over time? What's the trend, do you think?
Maybe the computing pie gets bigger faster than the software needs can be turned into non-programming tasks.