> Can someone explain how it in any way indicates how close we are to "AGI"?
I think it is historical name.
At some point when benchmarking was very undeveloped, this was targeting abstract reasoning and generalization, hence AGI.
Big part of problem is that many companies hire foreigners not because it is "easier", it is not, but because they pay them little while holding in visa slavery.
On top of that, the way they hire foreigners and provide permanent residence path to them is straight fraud: they put job ads into some local newspaper no one reads to prove there is no local competition for the opening.
Depending on scale of your products you may find that single person won't be able to cover all aspects. "Prompting" requires some domain knowledge and also quality control and guidance.
> Today my "coding" sessions often enough begin with real life problems
intuition is that your sessions consists of 10% of domain related reasoning, and 90% of code plumbing. Those 90% could be moved to cheap and efficient specialized and focused model.
> Is this article trying to make me feel bad for these people?
Its so loaded question.
You picked two cases, while ignoring huge flaws of the system, because of which there is a chance innocent people get executed. Frank Athen Walls is likely very different person today compared to what he was 40 years ago, what is the rational to execute him now?