Opus 4.7 (haven't tried 4.8) just really struggles writing correct code for complicated (i.e. valuable) work. I can handle architecture, which takes <1% of my time anyway. But writing code that's wrong is a cardinal sin. I've had much more luck with GPT 5.5 so far.

This is exactly right. Claude has baked in autonomy and preferences that let it handle underspecified prompts elegantly, which makes it seem smarter to people who like to prompt that way, but it also ignores instructions and fights you on things, which makes it a bad model for people who know what they want to do and specify it.

More interesting than arguing a jumble of electrochemical reactions have taste? That may seem more readily familiar but is no less strange if you prod at it. Nonetheless it’s difficult to argue either don’t produce output that has qualities of discernment (ie taste).

Isn't it just arguing that one complex weighted graph was tuned to output tokens that more align with what current day users would define as 'taste'?

I don't think it necessarily says anything about a model itself having 'taste' in some subjective way.

If the fashion changes would the model update with it without retraining? No. So the model doesn't have 'taste' in that sense. It has alignment to current human definitions of taste.

The roulette pockets for the model are bigger for some outputs than others. Draw a big enough black box around it and a different one around humans and it's insistinguishable.

The taste that the complex weighted graph was trained on was better for one than the other I think is the long winded way to say it

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