Five years ago, AI coding tools were mostly autocomplete gimmicks. They could save keystrokes, generate boilerplate, and occasionally surprise you with something useful, but nobody serious thought they were close to replacing real engineering work.
Today, frontier systems can operate inside repositories for hours, coordinate multiple agents, run tests, debug failures, and ship substantial features with limited supervision.
The speed of progress has been absurd.
The important shift wasn’t just “models got smarter”. The entire paradigm changed several times: from autocomplete, to conversational coding, to tool use, to autonomous agents, to full software engineering systems.