The code it produces (svelte, typescript, python) is usually riddled with small errors , deprecated usage, reimplementation, and terrible segmentation. This is opus 4.5. Literally every single time if I did not review it carefully and edit it thoroughly it would be a mountain of extremely hard to debug tech debt. It’s a toss up if it’s actual faster to be honest. I think the phenomenon of people expressing their hopes of the technology as if they were the current reality is an extremely interesting phenomenon.
Your experience mirrors mine as well. I will say since I’ve got both data science and engineering workflows, data science is where I’ve been accelerated the most because opus can do ad hoc scripts and e.g. streamlit websites and data munging very well so all of the things that take time before decisioning are much faster.
For engineering, its extremely easy to not only acquire tech debt but to basically run yourself into the ground when opus cannot do a task but doesn’t know it cannot do a task.
BUT: what I will say is to me and to others the trajectory has been really impressive over the last 1.5 years, so I don’t view the optimism of “we’re nearly there!” As being kind of wishful or magical thinking. I can definitely believe by the end of 2026 we’ll have agents that break through the walls that it still can’t climb over as of today just based on the rate of improvements we’ve seen so far and the knowledge that we still have a lot of headroom just with current stack.
