I am not claiming to be a great forecaster, or anything, but to me "it sucks now, it's gonna get better, and then it's gonna get even better" was already apparent to me as highly likely starting around GPT-3. (The rationalist bloggers apparently already knew it as of GPT-2. Scott Alexander and Gwern, for example.)

I did not know when it would become so practical that I'd not feel much desire to hand-write code, but I was pretty confident it was coming.