I’m definitely on the “just use the clanker” end of the spectrum. But knowing when and is good. Constantly having to argue with people’s reposting of Claude’s idea of what’s wrong has left me burned out. At this point, if I have any idea about what’s going on and someone tells me “Claude says”, I will ignore them.
In this case, it sounds like you could have made a ten line repro that shows the problem. Why not just send that, something human interpretable?
Giving it a specific plan will get you a solid test harness.
And setting up an autoresearch system and running it overnight will get you expert level optimizations if you set the metric up right.
These things excel at performance optimizations.