It can be really tempting to think about research progression on a "linear" timescale but more often than not it eventually ends up following an "exponential" c

It can be really tempting to think about research progression on a "linear" timescale but more often than not it eventually ends up following an "exponential" curve because of technical debt. And there appears to be a _lot_ of techniques used here which we don't fully understand. I wouldn't be surprised if a specifically engineered system ten years from now wins an ICPC gold medal but I'm pretty sure that a general purpose specification -> code synthesizer that would actually threaten software engineering would require us to settle a lot of technical debts first -- especially in the area of verifying code/text generation using large language models.