We had O1 and Gemini 2.5 Pro last year, which were both very good models, just not for long horizon agentic tasks. They were surprisingly capable, just not without a lot of hand holding.

Current models are very good for long horizon agentic tasks, but they lack taste and higher level organizational principles. They can get a tremendous amount done with limited hand holding, but they still tend to build messy slop unsupervised/without intervention.

By this time next year hand writing code will be dead outside the rarest domains, and agents will be able to build larger projects coherently, and in two years human software taste and architectural guidance will be basically redundant. I predicted the complete automation (3+ 9s) of software engineering in 3 years back in mid 2025, if anything we're slightly ahead of schedule.