I'd argue LLM coding agents are still bad at many more things. But to comment on the two problems raised in the post:

> LLMs don’t copy-paste (or cut and paste) code.

The article is confusing the architectural layers of AI coding agents. It's easy to add "cut/copy/paste" tools to the AI system if that shows improvement. This has nothing to do with LLM, it's in the layer on top.

> Good human developers always pause to ask before making big changes or when they’re unsure [LLMs] keep trying to make it work until they hit a wall -- and then they just keep banging their head against it.

Agreed - LLMs don't know how to back track. The recent (past year) improvements in thinking/reasoning do improve in this regard (it's the whole "but wait..." RL training that exploded with OpenAI o1/o3 and DeepSeek R1, now done by everyone), but clearly there's still work to do.