I used to do software dev without meetings. It worked just fine. I would send whatever I did once it was done, and get direction on where to take it next. Maybe this breaks down in companies with more than a few leaders, or where the leaders can't otherwise keep in sync.

Also gave me plenty of opportunities to go above and beyond. I miss when that felt safe.

> Humans also work because they've been trained on a massive corpus of materials,

Massive? My introduction to programming (from noob to beginner level) has been like only 10 books worth of content. Including some alternative pathways like 3D, security, system administration,... To this day, I don't think I've reached 50 books of materials. And If I counted everything it would be still small.

Human learning is very efficient (not time wise, but cost wise, and even training data wise).