I worked for mid size Insure tech company that has good footprint in the industry and two years ago, LLM were good enough for us to refactor & rewrite major tech debt. Even two years ago, models were already impressive & capable. For me, the timeline been two years and counting.

A year ago I was also doing major refactoring and it saved several months of time (probably wouldn't have even attempted it otherwise). But LLMs still weren't as capable as they are now for more interesting tasks than that. I struggled with an LLM assisted conversion project, eventually just shelved it, and started it again recently and the difference is quite noticeable.

But even so, the entire ecosystem has been changing over this entire time. You might be using an entirely different set of LLM tools now and/or those tools themselves have gotten a lot better and easier to use.