Real developer who has been programming daily since the 80s. The quality of the models used to vary pretty wildly, but here in the past year or two, everything has gotten way better and most models are pretty capable. Claude, Gemini, GLM, Kimi, DeepSeek. The prices haven't, but my advice is to ignore the bullshit and just pick the models that work for you. Claude isn't 25x better than DeepSeek, so it doesn't deserve to be 25x the cost.

I think Claude and OpenAI have started to realize that nobody's buying their overpriced token costs. Although, frankly, none of these prices even make sense compared the cost of compute for an average cloud-based GPU cluster. I can't see how any of these companies are making a profit, just riding the private equality wave until the money runs out. Maybe Amazon, Microsoft, Google, since they own their own hardware, but not OpenAI or Anthropic. China's going to run them out of business in a few years, anyway.

And of course, if you have the option, use local models. VRAM size is still a bit of a problem, but quantization techniques have gone a long way. You can run a decent model on a personal PC with a bit of tweaking, for home programming tasks, or just a personal model that doesn't immediately sell your data to Peter Thiel.

My boss has been in it since like the early 80s, programming with basic and assembly. The turning point for him was a month or so ago when Claude found a bug in our mesh firmware that he had been trying to figure out for months. Edge case in hub mode when a message was in route to a device that momentarily dropped from the mesh. Flag gets cleared but no timer set to clear the buffer if the device doesn't show back up in time. Super fun async RF problems, intermittent and ridiculously hard to find proxy buffer issue that was nearly impossible to reproduce. Old devs made code to lie and say the device was offline when it was still send it's UID over RDM. So they knew the bug was there for YEARS. With a ton of logs and access to the specific files, Claude found the bug in like 45 mins. It was kind of crazy.

As an electrical engineer who has been doing full stack dev, firmware all the way up to board design and layout for about 16 years now, it's getting better every single day. My boss is finally coming around after being the biggest shit talker for the last year and half. Is the code perfect? No. Does anyone write perfect code... NO! It is a tool that needs to be driven correctly. If you don't like it, don't use it! Is it going away? No! And it doesn't look like anything we say is going to change that. Live with it, it's the only option.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinions. Everyone has their own experiences too. Be fucking nice tho, why is everyone so hostile. Go back to reddit if you want to be an asshole. Not you dread beef, just in general.

What model was the last one you used? Fable and opus 5.5 produce pretty good code, and also can find quite a lot of edge case issues too when reviewing.

You can dev as long as you like, doesnt make you good at using a new tool by default. Its a tool, it works for millions of people. Why do you think you're special.

The smugness in assuming that 'anyone who uses x tool is stupid.'

Self awareness at critical low.