> the vast majority of software out there barely needs to scale or be super efficient

That was the way I saw it for a while. In recent months I've begun to wonder if I need to reevaluate that, because it's become clear to me that scaling doesn't actually start from zero. By zero I mean that I was naive enough to think that all programs, even the most googled programmed one by a completely new junior would at least have, some, efficiency... but some of these LLM services I get to work on today are so bad they didn't start at zero but at some negative number. It would have been less of an issue if our non-developer-developers didn't use Python (or at least used Python with ruff/pyrefly/whateveryoulike, but some of the things they write can't even scale to do minimal BI reporting.

Maybe automated testing of all forms will just become much more ubiquitous as a safeguard against the worst of AI hallucinations? I feel that would solve a lot of people's worries about LLMs. I'm imagining a world where a software developer is a person who gathers requirements, writes some tests, asks the AI to modify the codebase, ensures the tests still work, makes sure they are a human who understands the change the AI just made, and continues with the next requirement.