And how much of pre-LLM code was just copy pasta from Stack Overflow?
Code doesn't need to be novel to be useful. There's a reason why design patterns are a thing in software.
Code doesn't need to be novel to be useful. There's a reason why design patterns are a thing in software.
AI is not an abstraction.
Back to the original point, though: most software engineering work isn't novel. Most people are working on slightly different iterations of the same thing, but with the aim of different products. You can have completely different products that use nearly the same patterns as most other services.
To put it bluntly: we don't need AI to generate novel code for the vast majority of the software being built.