The development of steam technology is a great metaphor. The basic understanding of steam as a thing that could yield some kind of mechanical force almost certainly predated even the Romans. That said, it was the synthesis of other technologies with these basic concepts that started yielding really interesting results.
Put another way, the advent of industrialized steam power wasn't so much about steam per se, but rather the intersection of a number of factors (steam itself obviously being an important one). This intersection became a lot more likely as the pace of innovation in general began accelerating with the Enlightenment and the ease with which this information could be collected and synthesized.
I suspect that the LLM itself may also prove to be less significant than the density of innovation and information of the world it's developed in. It's not a certainty that there's a killer app on the scale of mechanized steam, but the odds of such significant inventions arguably increase as the basics of modern AI become basic knowledge for more and more people.
Its mostly metallurgy. The fact that we became so much better and precise at metallurgy enabled us to make use of steam machines. Of course a lot of stuff helped (Glassmaking, whale oil immediatly come to mind) but mostly, metallurgy.
I remember reading an article that argued that it was basically a matter of being path dependent. The earliest steam engines that could do useful work were notoriously large and fuel-inefficient, which is why their first application was for pumps in coal mines - it effectively made the fuel problem moot and similarly their other limitations were not important in that context, while at the same time rising wages in UK made even those inefficient engines more affordable than manual labor. And then their use in that very narrow niche allowed them to be gradually improved to the point where they became suitable for other contexts as well.
But if that analogy holds, then LLM use in software development is the "new coal mines" where it will be perfected until it spills over into other areas. We're definitely not at the "Roman stage" anymore.
If we go by that analogy, i think LLMs (and all of current programming automation like compilers) are just different mechanical parts. They will improve in quality, in precision, surrounding product will make them even more effective (MCP is vulcanized rubber here? :D), but they aren't coal or even the steam engine.
Put another way, the advent of industrialized steam power wasn't so much about steam per se, but rather the intersection of a number of factors (steam itself obviously being an important one). This intersection became a lot more likely as the pace of innovation in general began accelerating with the Enlightenment and the ease with which this information could be collected and synthesized.
I suspect that the LLM itself may also prove to be less significant than the density of innovation and information of the world it's developed in. It's not a certainty that there's a killer app on the scale of mechanized steam, but the odds of such significant inventions arguably increase as the basics of modern AI become basic knowledge for more and more people.