Having to prime it with more context and more guardrails seems to imply they're getting worse. That's fewer context and guardrails it can infer/intuit.
The peak capability is very obviously, and objectively, increasing.
The scaffolding you need to elicit top performance changes each generation. I feel it’s less scaffolding now to get good results. (Lots of the “scaffolding” these days is less “contrived AI prompt engineering” and more “well understood software engineering best practices”.)