I think this is a description of how things are today, but not an inherent property of how the models are built. Over the last year or so the trend seems to be moving from “more data” to “better data”. And I think in most narrow domains (which, to be clear, general coding agent is not!) it’s possible to train a smaller, specialized model reaching the performance of a much larger generic model.

Disclaimer: this is pretty much the thesis of a company I work for, distillabs.ai but other people say similar things e.g. https://research.nvidia.com/labs/lpr/slm-agents/