> 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.

> LLMs have been a very useful tool to generate non-throwaway code for at least 2 years.

I was in YC W24 (exactly two years ago) with an AI coding startup ("agentic" and "vibe" buzzwords weren't invented yet). LLMs were useful as smarter autocomplete, but were struggling (and us with them!) on anything nontrivial.

Comparing that state to the past few months and saying it's just a social change is a bit of a stretch :)

Nope.

Source: Multiple successful prodiction applications with >90% LLM generated code already in Late 2024/Early 2025. Not slop, not note taking apps. Nothing ground-breaking but real-world valuable usecases. Both by myself and by others.

Aider came out May 2023. Augment Code (not very well known but best in class for a long time, hilariously poor at marketing/sales completely bungling this advantage) was April 2024.