GPT-4 showed the potential but the automated workflows (context management, loops, test-running) and pure execution speed to handle all that "reasoning"/workflows (remember watching characters pop in slowly in GPT-4 streaming API response calls) are gamechangers.
The workflow automation and better (and model-directed) context management are all obvious in retrospect but a lot of people (like myself) were instead focused on IDE integration and such vs `grep` and the like. Maybe multi-agent with task boards is the next thing, but it feels like that might also start to outrun the ability to sensibly design and test new features for non-greenfield/non-port projects. Who knows yet.
I think it's still very valuable for someone to dig in to the underlying models periodically (insomuch as the APIs even expose the same level of raw stuff anymore) to get a feeling for what's reliable to one-shot vs what's easily correctable by a "ran the tests, saw it was wrong, fixed it" loop. If you don't have a good sense of that, it's easy to get overambitious and end up with something you don't like if you're the sort of person who cares at all about what the code looks like.