> What happened? Kroah-Hartman shrugged: "We don't know. Nobody seems to know why. Either a lot more tools got a lot better, or people started going ..."

Odd sentiment. It's pretty clear the tools crossed a threshold last year (in April as I recall) where they became good enough to actually write entire applications, and just accelerated from there. Today they're amazing and no-one I know is writing artisanal code anymore (at least, not at work).