> single useful ... preferably reliable, program that solves a non-trivial problem that hasn't been solved before a bunch of times in publicly available code
I see this originality criteria appended a lot, and
1) I don't think it's representative of the actual requirements for something to be extremely useful and productivity-enhancing, even revolutionary, for programming. IDE features, testing, code generation, compilers — all of these things did not really directly help you produce more original solutions to original problems, and yet they were huge advances in program or productivity.
I mean like. How many such programs are there in general?
The vast vast majority of programs that are written are slight modifications, reorganizations, or extensions, of one or more programs that are already publicly available a bunch of times over.
Even the ones that aren't could fairly easily be considered just recombinations of different pieces of programs that have been written and are publicly available dozens or more times over, just different parts of them combined in a different order.
Hell, most code is a reorganization or recombination of the exact same types of patterns just in a different way corresponding to different business logic or algorithms, if you want to push it that far.
And yet plenty of deeply unoriginal programs are very useful and fill a useful niche, so they get written anyway.
2) Nor is it a particularly satisfiable goal. If there aren't, as a percentage, very many reliable, useful, and original programs that have been written in the decades since open source became a thing, why would we expect a five-year-old technology to have done so, especially when, obviously, the more reliable original and broadly useful programs have already written, the narrower the scope for new ones to satisfy the originality criteria?
3) Nor is it actually something that we would expect even under the hypothesis that agents make people significantly more productive at programs. Even if agents give 100x productivity gains to writing a useful tool or service or program or improving existing ones with new features. We still wouldn't expect them to give necessarily very many much productivity gains at all to writing original programs, precisely because of their current technology is a product of deep thinking, understanding a specific domain, seeing a niche, inspiration, science, talent and luck much more than the ability to even do productive engineering.