The "current LLM prices" part is doing a lot of work in that argument though. Prices dropped roughly 10x in the past year, and model routing helps too -- not every inference call in an agent loop actually needs a frontier model. Tool output parsing, formatting, simple next-step decisions can use something that costs 1/100th of Opus without quality loss.

The real shift isn't just that code gets generated faster, it's that people are starting to use LLMs as runtime components. And the cost curve for that use case is moving way faster than most people realize.