Opus 4.5/4.6 are what many people consider the first 'good' models and it's from last year/start of this year.

But fine, let's say everything before gpt 5.5 was unusable crap. Then there should still be projects that would normally have previously taken ~2 years done in just two months. Where are they?

I’m starting to see huge solo projects with 100 commits per day turning up on GitHub.

Last year these were unusable slop.

Now they’re “getting there”. Not quite as good as hand crafted code written by humans, but usable.