> Any decently skilled human blows them out of the water

No, by far no. I’m by all accounts “decently skilled human”, at least if we go by our org, and it blows anyone out of the water with some slight guidance.

And the most important part: it doesn’t get tired, it doesn’t have any mood swings, its performance isn’t affected by poor sleep, party yesterday or their SO having a bad day.

I have 20 years of experience and I don't handwrite any code anymore. Opus does everything, and it only needs a bit of steering occasionally. If you can give it guardrails (ie a pre-existing design system) and ways to verify its output (ie enforce TDD and use Chrome to visually verify) then it gets it right basically every time.

The thing is, LLM's produce better quality one-shots than any of the products that get returned from overseas ultra-budget contractors in India or SEA. I don't know what that means for Western devs, but I can tell you that the fortune 500 I work for is dialing back on contracting and outsourcing because domestic teams can do higher-quality work faster.

Turns out there are whole categories of software where 'extremely fast and good enough' is what matters, even for skilled software developers.

I’ve been a full stack developer for 10+ years now and I completely disagree.

Modern models like Opus / Gemini 3 are great coding companions; they are perfectly capable of building clean code given the right context and prompt.

At the end of the day it’s the same rule of garbage in -> garbage out, if you don’t have the right context / skills / guidance you can easily end up with bad code as you could with good code.

Am I an untrained human if I believe that Claude Opus 4.6 produces generally better code than I do in most circumstances?

Even with years as a principal engineer at a company with high coding standards and engineering processes?