the LLM's themselves are making marginal gains, but the tools for using LLMs productively are getting so much better.
This. MCP/tool usage in agentic mode is insanely powerful. Let the agent ingest a Gitlab issue, tell it how it can run commands, tests etc. in the local environment and half of the time it can just iterate towards a solution all by itself (but watching and intervening when it starts going the wrong way is still advisable).
Recently I converted all the (Google Docs) documentation of a project to markdown files and added those to the workspace. It now indexes it with RAG and can easily find relevant bits of documentation, especially in agent mode.
It really stresses the importance of getting your documentation and processes in order as well as making sure the tasks at hand are well-specified. It soon might be the main thing that requires human input or action.
Every time I’ve tried to do that it takes longer than it would take me, and comes up with fairly obtuse solutions. The cursor agent seems incapable of putting code in the appropriate files in a functional language.
I 100% agree that documenting requirements will be the main human input to software development in the near future.
In fact, I built an entirely headless coding agent for that reason: you put tasks in, you get PRs out, and you get journals of each run for debugging but it discourages micro-management so you stay in planning/documenting/architecting.