What would a great leap forwards for humanity look like? Sure, making it easier to shovel out shovelware means more shovelware, but why is that a bad thing? If customers have a very specific problem that wasn't going to get solved because it was too expensive to build a custom solution, and they now get to have bespoke software to cure their ills, other than being judgemental about this hypothetical piece of software as being shovelware, why is that a bad thing?
Here's one version of what a great leap forward could look like, but it's simply one of many: an LLM that understand the CPU it's running on and can turn prompts into assembly, taking full advantage of the hardware. Or maybe it could target a virtual CPU like Java, but the point is that if the LLM can write code, why do it in Python or C? Just let it understand the CPU and let it rip. The only reason we have C/Python/etc. in the first place is because assembly sucks for humans to work with.
As to the shovelware, if it benefits people that's great, and I think the net benefit will likely be positive, but only slightly. The point in calling it shovelware is to suggest that it's low quality, and so it could have bugs and other performance issues that add costs to using which subtract from the benefit it provides (possibly in a net positive way, but probably not as fundamentally game changing as, say, Docker).
