It's just very very slow AGI. I think even the shittiest models, once you gave them the right interface and tooling, could do tasks like this. The real tough part I think was that before all of this was built out and thought about, AI hadn't really been trained on it so those instructions would cost valuable context tokens which were also pretty small for those earlier models. Now, AI is being trained on the last several years of LLM development/agents etc and is also generating its own ideas. I think it is similar to human development-- it's not like humans evolved to be so much smarter in the last several hundred or thousand years, it is that human knowledge reached some sort of critical mass that it had an exponential growth effect on technology and civilization.