I agree, but I would add that the hardest part of SQL is rarely the syntax itself. More often, it is understanding grain, cardinality, and join explosion. Many junior analysts know how to use JOIN and GROUP BY, yet still produce incorrect KPIs due to silent row duplication.

The feeling is that the most relevant point is no longer raw benchmarks or a few percentage points of difference between models, but the progressive increase in operational reliability within complex agentic workflows. Aspects such as self-correction, tool orchestration, coherent handling of multi-step contexts, and the ability to challenge unsound plans are probably becoming more important than pure generative capability itself. The more autonomous these systems become, the more the bottleneck shifts away from writing code and toward supervision, input quality, and real understanding of the application domain.