I don't think that people relying on the tools too much is the first sign I would identify to mean the bubble is popping

The market is priced at expecting AGI levels of breakthroughs. Just a very useful tool for programming is definitely not enough to keep the music playing.

the thing went from the transformer paper in 2017 to basically doing your job for you in 2026

The problem is that it's too expensive. It can technically do parts of my job for me, but at a variable cost that's higher than mine right now.

Efficiency is an angle of research that's quite active, see quantization, MoE, speculative decoding, QKV cache optimizations, sparse attention, etc

What does "AGI" mean to you such that we have not had it for years already? Whenever I see people mention AGI it's in the future tense, as if we don't have artificial machines that can apply intelligence to general domains.

If the market thought AGI was imminent the labs would be worth hundreds of trillions of dollars. AGI is one step away from fully automated economy.

AGI means that eventually there is just one profitable company left; but it is not clear at this point which one it will be. Also it's worth noting that the current market capitalization for the technology industry just in the US is around a third of a hundred trillion dollars (Which would be explained by the possibility of AGI emerging from another country/continent)

No, the clue is people realizing that relying on the tools costs too damn much. The tools may be fine-ish for what they do, but there might be a bubble built on unrealistically high expectations of revenues.