Has the bar raised so much that coding agents need to be even better than any human could do? If the coding agent lets you get done with 1 person what would've required a team of three and you are not going crazy "token maxxing" spending thousands of dollars a week that would be beneficial for a business.
That said, is what you're suggesting even happening? Because certainly that is not what we're hearing from companies that fucked up their budgets with AI tools. Also, trillion dollars valuations are really justified by random solo-devs creating automatic companies of one that could be companies of four? Because what I hear from the AI-accelerationist is "this technology creates productivity gains for each and every company by enabling automation at scale that would make replacing human profitable". Where is THAT?
Sure but getting more done with less is just how productivity gains work. If your talking about crushing an iOS backlog like the OP is it surely will not cost as much as a human to move along tons of bug fixes and accessibility changes etc.
Here are some case studies on recent anecdotal producitivity gains from AI agents https://cursor.com/blog/amplitude, https://devin.ai/customers/ramp, https://www.warmly.ai/p/blog/claude-code-best-practices.
The third one specifically says that a team of 8 "ships like a team of 24".
> Also, trillion dollars valuations are really justified by random solo-devs creating automatic companies of one that could be companies of four?
I feel like your greatly expanding the scope of this thread, I don't really know how to value these things.