I know it seems like forever ago, but claude code only came out in 2025.

Its very difficult to argue the point that claude code:

1) was a paradigm shift in terms of functionality, despite, to be fair, at best, incremental improvements in the underlying models.

2) The results are an order of magnitude, I estimate, better in terms of output.

I think its very fair to distill “AI progress 2025” to: you can get better results (up to a point; better than raw output anyway; scaling to multiple agents has not worked) without better models with clever tools and loops. (…and video/image slop infests everything :p).