As it turns out - 4 years before LLMs - at least one of the FAANGs already had auto-complete so good it could do most of what LLMs can practically do in a gigantic context.
But, sure...
Anywhere the risk of something going wrong is high, a lot of what you're paying engineers for is to minimize that risk while getting shit done - not to "just do the thing" you might think you're paying for.
Wherever "this sort of works" is good enough, LLMs will excel. Wherever it doesn't, you'll still be paying a lot of money for humans.
Mostly because non-engineers cannot define what "working" is most of the time it's important.
You don't go to a surgeon and tell him to replace your heart in some way. You go to a surgeon to "fix" your heart. You wouldn't even know what that meant. No amount of WebMD LLM summarization is going to help the average person.
Almost 20 years ago, IBM was famous for the average engineer writing ONE line of code per day...
It's not like IBM was paying people to do nothing, contrary to what most people thought who worked there for 15 years.
It's almost as if lines of code don't have value and a working product and the ability to change it reliably does.
Could you clarify what you're referring to? I'm interested.
Most problems are mostly non-novel but with a few added constraints, the combination of which can require a novel solution.
The above are definitely the majority of software people are paying developers to write. By an order of magnitude.
The novel problems for customers who specifically care about code quality is probably under 1% of software written.
If you don't recognise this, you simple don't understand the industry you work in.