my suspicion is that this is not how intelligence works. creativity comes from cross breeding ideas from many domains.

Sure, but in the context I was considering, creativity itself wasn't a concern.

For coding, creativity is not necessarily a good thing. There are well established patterns, algorithms, and applications could reasonably be construed as "good enough" to assist with the coding itself. Adding a human language model over that to understand the user's intents could be considered an overlay on the coding model.

I confess that this is willful projection of my hope to be able to self-host agents on affordable hardware. A frontier model on powerful hardware would always be preferable but sometimes "good enough" is just that.