> if you take code from a developer ten years ago and compare it with their output now, you can see improvement.

really? it depends on the type of development, but ten years ago the coder profession had already long gone mainstream and massified, with a lot of people just attracted by a convenient career rather than vocation. mediocrity was already the baseline ("agile" mentality to at the very least cope with that mediocrity and turnover churn was already at its peak) and on the other extreme coder narcissism was already en vogue.

the tools, resources, environments have indoubtedly improved a lot, though at the cost of overhead, overcomplexity. higher abstraction levels help but promote detachment from the fundamentals.

so specific areas and high end teams have probably improved, but i'd say average code quality has actually diminished, and keeps doing so. if it weren't for qa, monitoring, auditing and mitigation processes it would by now be catastrophic. cue in agents and vibe coding ...

as an old school coder that nowadays only codes for fun i see llm tools as an incredibly interesting and game changing tool for the profane, but that a professional coder might cede control to an agent (as opposed to use it for prospection or menial work) makes me already cringe, and i'm unable to wrap my head around vibe coding.