>they've gone from barely stringing together a TODO app to structuring and executing large-scale changes in entire repositories in 3 years
First they are definitely not currently as capable as you say. Second there is a misconception that the rise of LLMs has been exponential but the curve is really logistic and we've hit the flat tail hard imo. Where is ChatGPT5? All the Coding AI tools I've tried like Copilot either havent gotten better since release or seemingly gotten worse as they try to fine tune them. Third there is ton more to being a software engineer than writing ReactTodoAppMVCDemo which many responses have been talking about.
First they are definitely not currently as capable as you say. Second there is a misconception that the rise of LLMs has been exponential but the curve is really logistic and we've hit the flat tail hard imo. Where is ChatGPT5? All the Coding AI tools I've tried like Copilot either havent gotten better since release or seemingly gotten worse as they try to fine tune them. Third there is ton more to being a software engineer than writing ReactTodoAppMVCDemo which many responses have been talking about.