I'm seeing big advances that arent shown in the benchmarks, I can simply build software now that I couldnt build before. The level of complexity that I can manage and deliver is higher.
Performance can improve linearly and utility can be massively jumpy. For some people/tasks performance can have improved but it'll have been "interesting but pointless" until it hits some threshold and then suddenly you can do things with it.
Nothing fancy. Visual Studio Code + Copilot, agent mode, a couple prompt files, and that's it.
You could use Cursor, Windsurf, Q CLI, Claude Code, whatever else with Claude 3 or even an older model and you'd still get usable results.
It's not the models which have enabled "vibe coding", it's the tools.
An additional proof of that is that the new models focus more and more on coding in their releases, and other fields have not benefited at all from the supposed model improvements. That wouldn't be the case if improvements were really due to the models and not the tooling.
I have been using 'aider' as my go to coding tool for over a year. It basically works the same way that it always has: you specify all the context and give it a request and that goes to the model without much massaging.
I can see a massive improvement in results with each new model that arrives. I can do so much more with Gemini 2.5 or Claude 4 than I could do with earlier models and the tool has not really changed at all.
I will agree that for the casual user, the tools make a big difference. But if you took the tool of today and paired it with a model from last year, it would go in circles