[InclinedPlane]

To put words in your mouth, what you're saying is basically that we've reached the pinnacle of theory and practice in software engineering, aside from hiring AIs to do the job for us. That, to me, doesn't seem to be a tenable position. We haven't even reached the limit of application for known best practices, for example. And to say that we've reached the limit of understanding after only a few decades of practice seems equally unlikely.

Software is a complex subject, but is it so much different than chemistry, physics, mathematics? Each of which took hundreds of years to progress through multiple stages of advancement. Is functional flavored OOP with bolted on TDD the grand unified theory of programming? That seems unlikely to me. I suspect there are further conceptual breakthroughs on the horizon. And there is still a tremendous amount of improvement available just in getting everyone up to the level of adhering to known best-practices.