Boilerplate details mean we've failed as an industry. Why haven't we already got the computer to automate all the boring bits without AI?

I really enjoy working with Gleam which is a rather boilerplate heavy language. However most of the work is managed by a really well built LSP. If you're writing a strongly type language it's easy to programmatically manage all of the boilerplate. You could you an LLM but why bother when it's a so formulaic.

I feel that this is because people have been reinventing the wheel a lot in IT.

A lot of innovation that finally lands in programming languages has been done decades earlier, but now it's mostly awkwardly bolted on existing languages and frameworks.

why can't AI be that solution?

why use a nuclear bomb to drive a nail?

To further onto this, humans could technically simulate Turing machines themselves but they don't.

Efficiency and finding the right abstractions and tradeoffs is literally identical with making new capacities and capabilities. If all of your systems were truly "run by AI", we wouldn't have systems. Systems are systems because the AI uses well developed tools and protocols that humans have put together. It's a stable capacity.