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.
Obviously, this assumes you write enterprise grade code. YMMV
But still cottage industry of "clean code" is pushing me into self doubts and shame.
I’m not saying that you yourself have this attitude - but the “tests are for suckers, I just ship” crowd really grinds my gears because to me it says “ha! Why do you care about getting things right?”
Totally get where you’re coming from though, sometimes the expected behavior is trivial to verify or (in the case of GUIs) can be very difficult and not worth the effort to implement.