It seems to be true this time though; I have observed it myself and heard it from several experienced developers I personally know and respect. It feels like some threshold was crossed with Opus 4.5 and Gpt 5.3, where the models are now able to reliably solve certain classes of problems that were previously unreliable.

Time will tell of course, and it’s early, but inflection points do exist with progress.

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TeriyakiBomb 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Thing is. You can find an extremely similar paragraph written about Claude 4.x or some equivalent gpt. And simultaneously, many people expressing their frustration and the shortcomings of <insert any model>

“But it’s different this time” - several people, several times over the last couple of years.

This is not at all a dig at you, I’m very sorry if it reads that way. My point is these things only get truly better in anecdotes. The ways in which they fail is yet to change. Just yesterday I had gpt 5.3 generate completely awful code for the Cinema 4D Python API. Also an anecdote. But for all of the people saying they are truly intelligent and truly reason, they still make obvious mistakes, write around problems, fail entirely at architectural decisions, fail at random, generate FAR too much code.

And no amount of harnesses, methodologies, loops make much of a difference. If you listen to people on the internet they say it’s all working. You listen to people on the job and they mostly say it’s creating tech debt and a review bottleneck. Also burnout, so much burnout.

I think LLMs are mediocre. I think it’s fine they’re mediocre. You can work with low expectations. But the hype cycles are so tiresome.

	▲	user43928 a minute ago \| parent [-]
		I believe it is a widely accepted opinion that agentic coding took off with Opus 4.5 late in 2025. Why would you attempt to use GPT 5.3 to generate code today and form an opinion on that basis? I do not think it is even still available in Codex, I believe it only has the smaller, distilled GPT 5.3 Codex Spark.

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ModernMech 31 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If it's so evident, why can't someone prove it with something more than "it seems better and everyone agrees"?

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bluefirebrand 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I wonder how much of it is real and how much of it is people just being worn down by the hype to the point they can't fight it anymore

Very smart people aren't immune to being worn down over time

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simonw 11 hours ago | parent [-]

I really don't think that's how it works. Smart, experienced developers who thought coding agents were junk for most of 2025 and think they're useful now in 2026 are not saying that because they got "worn down over time".

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TeriyakiBomb 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It tends to be when the training data wanders into their area of expertise temporarily and they go “OMG, they hype is real. I was so wrong” and then a few releases later they’re on the train and furious that the skills in their domain space have not just stopped improving, but regressed. Cue someone else in a different part of the world starting the same cycle.

Meanwhile the guy who leaned in a year ago and gave up reading the output is beginning to see work grind to a halt and throwing more agents at it is increasingly not working.

You can see these tropes all over social media near constantly.

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SpaceNoodled 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As a smart, experienced developer who's getting worn down over time, I disagree.

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gymbeaux 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I didn’t start using Claude Code until late 2025. Prior to that I would use ChatGPT to give me snippets of code but I was still doing most of the actual code writing. Coworkers told me in late 2025 about how they hadn’t written a line of code in “months” and just use Claude Code/agentic “whatever” so I tried out Claude Code and was pleasantly surprised. It is passable to have entire apps written by LLMs (I’ve made several that I otherwise never would have had the time to create by hand), but I wouldn’t say maintainable or easily extendable. It’s hard to be specific, but there’s something about LLM code that doesn’t look “natural”, and I’m not talking about the excessive use of comments in code. The code itself is unnatural. Functional, but unnatural. I wouldn’t want to suddenly lose LLMs and have to read through and understand and continue enhancing a codebase created by an LLM.

	▲	fcatalan 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		For me it feels a lot like generated images or video. I've made lots of things now, but those that are 100% LLM written "work" but are uncanny, weird and the details are wrong everywhere you care to look in detail.

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trashface 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I was getting useful coding work done with GPT 3.5. I think devs saying "the models are finally good enough" this year are just trying to save face from their own previous irrational denials.

	▲	ben_w 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Useful, yes, sometimes, but it wasn't fully automated "Here's our JIRA board URL, fix everything that's rated 1-3 story points and in the current sprint". Now it is.