Processes, tools, and diligence vigilantly seem the most apparent path. Perhaps rehash the 50 year old debate of professionalization while AI vibes coding is barking at the door, because what could possibly go wrong with even less experience doing the same thing and expecting a different result.
I don't think we'll reach this promised land™ until incentives re-align. Treating software as an assembly line was obviously The Wrong Thing judging by the results - problem is how can we ever move to a model that rewards quality perhaps similar to (book) authors and royalties?
Owner-operator SaaS is about as close as you can get but limits you to web and web-adjacent.
Get couple shredded guys and gals to show off how fit they are so everyone feels guilty they are snacking past 8PM.
Sell another batch of “how to do pushups” followed by “how to do pushups vol.2” with “pushup pro this time even better”.
Where in the end normal people are not getting paid for getting shredded, they get paid for doing their stuff.
I just constantly feel like I am not a proper dev because I mostly skip unit tests - but on the other hand I built last 15 years couple of systems that worked and were bringing in value.
(The answer btw: Because nobody would be able to explain to a jury/judge that 80% or whatever is enough)
Everybody who worked with the 2005 Toyota Camry ETCS would have known what was up when it killed a few people, for example. Nobody can work on spaghetti code of that magnitude and not realize that something is off.
Boeing employees who tried to blow the whistle were similarly ignored or silenced while a few died in mysterious circumstances.