It's clear to anyone paying attention that LLMs hit a wall a while back. RAG is just expert systems with extra steps. 'Reasoning' is just burning more tokens in hopes it somehow makes the results better. And lately we've seen that a small blanket is being pulled that way or another.
LLMs are cool, machine learning is cooler. Still no 'AI' in sight.
I'm using Claude 3.7 now and while it improved on certain areas, it degraded on others (ie: it randomly removes/changes things more now).