alt Hacker NewsBoth is true, models have also been significantly improved in the last year alone, let's not even talk about 4 years ago. Agents, tooling and other sugar on top is just that - enabling more efficient and creative usage, but let's not undermine how much better models today are compared to what was available in the past.
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The code that's generated when given a long leash is still crap. But damned if I didn't use a JIRA mcp and a gitlab mcp, and just have the corporate AI just "do" a couple of well defined and well scoped tickets, including interacting with JIRA to get the ticket contents, update its progress, push to gitlab, and open an MR. Then, the corporate CodeRabbit does a first pass code review against the code so any glaring errors are stomped out before a human can review it. What's more scary though is that the JIRA tickets were created by a design doc that was half AI generated in the first place. The human proposed something, the AI asked clarifying questions, then broke the project down into milestones and then tickets, and then created the epic and issues on JIRA. One of my tradie friends taking an HVAC class tells me that there are a couple of programmers in his class looking to switch careers. I don't know what the future brings, but those programmers (sorry, "software developers") may have the right idea.
How do you judge model improvements vs tooling improvements?
If not working at one of the big players or running your own, it appears that even the APIs these days are wrapped in layers of tooling and abstracting raw model access more than ever.