Agents are doing the lazy work that people aren't.

In NZ there's a famous story about gold miners who were mining one side of a river, and didn't go to the other side because it was too much work. One miner's dog swam over, so the dude went to get his dog and found a motherlode.

After all, the whole LLM thing started because they started increasing the parameter counts, even though there was no particular reason an AI would get better with more parameters.