Note that blog posts rarely show the 20 other times it failed to build something and only that time that it happened to work.

We've been having same progression with self driving cars and they are also stuck on the last 10% for last 5 years

I agree with your observation, but not your conclusion. The 20 times it failed basically don't matter -- they are branches that can just be thrown away, and all that was lost is a few dollars on tokens (ignoring the environmental impact, which is a different conversation).

As long as it can do the thing on a faster overall timeline and with less human attention than a human doing it fully manually, it's going to win. And it will only continue to get better.

And I don't know why people always jump to self-driving cars as the analogy as a negative. We already have self-driving cars. Try a Waymo if you're in a city that has them. Yes, there are still long-tail problems being solved there, and limitations. But they basically work and they're amazing. I feel similarly about agentic development, plus in most cases the failure modes of SWE agents don't involve sudden life and death, so they can be more readily worked around.

With "art" we're now at a situation where I can get 50 variations of a image prompt within seconds from an LLM.

Does it matter that 49 of them "failed"? It cost me fractions of a cent, so not really.

If every one of the 50 variants was drawn by a human and iterated over days, there would've been a major cost attached to every image and I most likely wouldn't have asked for 50 variations anyway.

It's the same with code. The agent can iterate over dozens of possible solutions in minutes or a few hours. Codex Web even has a 4x mode that gives you 4 alternate solutions to the same issue. Complete waste of time and money with humans, but with LLMs you can just do it.