> Why would the volume that any of this be increasing exponentially?

Because the limiting factor for software has always been the supply, not the demand. When the average human engineer would ship 100 lines of production code / week, you could only afford to do the most critical things. But if code gets cheaper to produce, the projects that were marginal become worth doing, and the projects that were obviously insane become marginal. And that's exactly what is happening as models get cheaper and better, leading to the frontier of worthwhile projects expanding rapidly.

> And what are all the engineers doing when (besides the model quality) their products don't seem to be changing very much?

That's got some nice But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? energy to it!