> There seems to be a concencus among people I follow/read, that somewhere around that time was an inflexion point in coding LLMs, and this matches my personal experience.

LLMs have been a very useful tool to generate non-throwaway code for at least 2 years. It's a question of Overton Window, of mainstream acceptance, that has made you and the people you're talking about come to a "consensus" that there was an agentic LLM coding step change around that time. There was indeed an inflection point, but it was a social one: a window shift, where it became socially acceptable among mainstream SWEs to hold this sentiment. It had already been the case for a long time, but for those who understood this, expressing that was still not deemed acceptable. Doing so would brand one as a hyper, at least in the particular circles you were in.

You were in reality part of the doomers, just as much as the current doomers are still doomers.