I mostly disagree with this.

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