I've been around for a while. The closest we ever got was probably RPA. This time it's different. In my organisation we have non-programmers writing software that brings them business value on quite a large scale. Right now it's mainly through the chat framework we provide them so that they aren't just spamming data into chatGPT or similar. A couple of them figured out how to work the API and set up their own agents though.

Most of it is rather terrible, but a lot of the times it really doesn't matter. At least most of it scales better than Excel, and for the most part they can debug/fix their issues with more prompts. The stuff that turns out to matter eventually makes it to my team, and then it usually gets rewritten from scratch.

I think you underestimate how easy it is to get something to work well enough with AI.