I sometimes wonder how much of intelligence is being good with tools.

I feel pretty averagely smart but give me some good tooling like a good editor, a good type system, semantic grep, good testing and some solvers and I can actually deliver some work.

Maybe the trick isn't 500 billion parameters but a model super integrated with the task at hand for iteration and debugging?

FWIW the article really mirrors my own experience. I can run a small gemma4 for quick edits (and it's fast!) or data cleanup but for other tasks you do need a different tool (claude).