> It's taken 8 years to go from introduction of the Transformer (attention paper) to today's LLMs

I feel this position severely discounts the acceleration that is going on right now and our inherently limited abilities. Humans are not going to ever be significantly better at coding than they are today, and we can literally watch LLMs improve on it, by the month.

We'll see. I think software development is one of the more challenging things that humans are capable of, and the challenge isn't because of something that computers have any advantage with due to computation speed or memory (unlike, say, chess).

I wouldn't expect to see a human level AI software developer (not just "coder" - the easiest part of the job) until we have human level AGI. Run-time compute and agents seem to be responsible for most of the recent advances in capability - good ways to squeeze the most out of the underlying LLM paradigm, but not the path to AGI.

We'll get there (AGI) one day, maybe in next 10-20 years, but in meantime if you want a vibe coded pile of sphaghetti to be cleaned up, it seems like it's going to be a job for a human.