Comment by ReptileMan

Anecdata of 1 but it is real. At the end of last year they passed some invisible threshold and became useful. I don't think it is models themselves, but mostly the much more powerful harnesses and I guess their tool calling abilities.

What changed I think was the context harvesting capability of the models. What most programmers did was - debugging and figuring out how something works were the time consuming part - the fix was usually trivial. And now models could do in seconds what took a developer hour or more.

If right now we create a smart grep that just takes everything for a piece of code and outlaw llm-s we will not regress to the previous level. The developers needed this context as much as llm-s to do their job.