Hypothesis: the pairing / collaboration makes it much more likely to find a fruitful road previously dismissed, because... that's what happens in fiction - including books, movies, and journalism (long-form "people stories"). It's a common trope: if one character dismisses a course of action, the plot demands the other character to take it.

In a way LLMs are, after all, trained to LARP people, including fictional characters and their tropes - this was actually exploited for jailbreaking to good effect in the late pre-agentic era (read: some two years ago). C.f. Waluigi effect. Not sure if it still holds for current models, but I can't imagine why it would not.

Yes there are two interesting derivative questions from this, assuming I understand it.

First, is it reproducible consistently at ~50% of workers? If not, what is the rate.

Second, are there any lessons to be learned here to increase the rate of success by changing models/weights/training?

The news by itself isn't really good news. But it could lead to good news. Maybe.