It doesn't need to be an existential threat to humanity - it's an existential threat to their business. They need agentic workflows to work for their business to become profitable. So pouring money into the "no engineers write code anymore, only agents" model is at once R&D, QA, product development, and advertising. They can spend as much of their investors' money on this as they have to because if they can't (sustainably) sell this vision to other companies, their company collapses.

What is post-ZIRP please :-) ?

Zero interest rate policy. When interest rates are Near zero you can spend money like it’s free. A lot of what we thought of as like normal engineering culture were the result of interest rates being zero.

Tah for that.

Why try to disrupt software though?

Isn't this the classic "dev wants to do start-up, has no skills ouside dev, do builds a dev tool" trap?

I don’t think they chose software, software chose them. Its the only real entry point they have to make serious money.