The problem is that in order to win you need to be in the top 1-10%, since you are competing against the same engineers. Being slightly above the average is only "good enough" to not get fired.

And the bar is already raised because every single one of those engineers now has access to the same models. So you need to be in the top 1% of the engineers armed with LLMs. You can't just rely on LLMs getting better. AI is not the great equalizer, it is, in fact the opposite.