Author here. Here is my PoV on that evolution.

1 year ago Claude Code was relatively new, and a first polished tool that really fitted my CLI-centeric dev-views. I used Aider before, but Claude Code was just much better. The autocomplete AI coders did not seem useful, and didn't have good integrations with Helix text editor. However even the frontier models were relatively bad in practice. Useful but not trustworthy at all. Being wrong/stupid 5-10% of the time compounds quickly.

6 months ago agents became really robust at just writing code they were told to write. Around that time I started really leaning into LLM-assisted coding, which require some skill, experience and adapting own workflows and tooling. And it takes time and effort.

Right now frontier models are really productive and robust. Sure it's still a fancy-autocomplete under the hood, so one needs to plan around that, but it's more common for Slopus finds bugs in my old human-written code, than I find bugs in its new code, especially that one can now easily write and maintain tons of tests which otherwise would never get done. LLMs don't have context and good judgment, so it still takes a lot of designing and steering the agent to write the right thing, but that's OK. And as the productivity bottleneck shifted very heavily from writing code to all other thing around it, it makes it very apparent that it's not that the clanker now that needs to get better, but the process around it.