software engineering is just not that hard
I'll disagree on semantics here, it's precisely because software engineering is hard (not difficult, but rigid - objective) that makes it a good fit for LLM agent execution. Soft, squishy, ill-defined fields are going to be a worse fit for LLMs because the practitioners themselves can't create clear cut (hard) definitions of what it is they expect out of their practitioners, they just "know it when they see it." As for relative difficulty, the "soft" fields have a very sliding scale for that with a lot of allowance given to newbies that isn't accepted "at the highest levels" whereas, software engineering just is what it is, it doesn't get more difficult as you progress in the field. Your job as a software architect / engineer is actually to find the easiest workable solution(s).
People will code by hand for aesthetic reasons just like people learn the violin instead of using a synth
I think it's more like: people will code C or Rust or Python by hand just like people still code assembly by hand - exceptionally rare stubbornness with an exceptionally small audience who could even understand what they have done to begin to care about it. Violin vs synth - most of the world can listen and appreciate and have an opinion even if a vanishingly small fraction could ever hope to have the patience, let alone skill, to compose or perform at the highest levels of either form. "Synth" is a very broad target these days, varying from direct composition to performance digital transformation, through interfaces of every description and complexity: simple contact closure keyboards through multi-dimensional velocity, attack angle, strike momentum, and many dimensions of aftertouch bends which allow more expressivity than even bow and fingers on strings do, if the performer cares to train in that popularly scorned field. Having done a little amateur composition to performance vs performance capture synth work, I'll say: once you have trained to work with the complex input devices, capture of live performance is hundreds of times more efficient than specifying all the nuance of a real performance as notation in a composition. The main reason people hate synth performances is that most synth performances are hack level, because hack level is easier (read: possible) on synth than a minimally passable live performance on violin with strings and bow.
Similarly, most people are hating on AI slop because it's so easy to produce and so many untalented hacks are using it to produce sub-par whatever it is they are making: code, prose, art, music... used as a tool, with a high bar of standards required before publication and release, LLMs are a powerful tool that can accelerate many creative processes, not just produce a lot of slop quickly.