Yeah, improving on 2024 performance was a pretty low bar to clear, by mid-2025 I saw the continuing improvement and decided that even if it was marginal at the time, learning how to use it was probably worthwhile given the improvements that seemed to be coming. Those improvements definitely did come from my perspective. Much of it was in the harnesses - many things I used to have to tell models explicitly, repeatedly in fall of 2025 they started doing without explicit prompting by spring of 2026. I also think I learned what they could be expected to do well and what was a waste of time trying which made me more productive with them as well.

I recently heard that Kimi v3 has made significant progress in code quality - with some people calling it "on par" with Claude. I primarily use Claude Opus - when I tried Fable during their free preview it "felt" even better, but not enough better to shell out a lot of extra cash for personal playtime projects. Kimi isn't as accessible under the fixed monthly price model so I'm unlikely to try it anytime soon.