Hit the nail on the head. Development methodologies pivoting at the whim of frontier models have been one of the things that have been worrying me as of late.
In a way, that’s the situation today. You can pay an experienced developer $$$$ to do it right, or you can outsource it and pay $$ but pay extra for more layers of review, have lots of unfixed bugs and more tech debt.
You are proposing that instead we pay the frontier model to clean it up. If it can, I expect it to cost somewhere in the neighborhood of an experienced dev because that’s the alternative. That’s the way the frontier AI companies will extracting the value of the work from you.
But there's two ways this could be true: Frontier models costs rise, or (more likely) experience dev costs fall
As long as the API is private or not dependent on by automated systems and you have good test coverage, you can get away with bad code IMO since you can always refactor. If it looks stupid but it works (and can be refactored/fixed/improved later if needed) it aint stupid.
They already did the bare minimum allocation to both despite engineering screaming at them.
I highly doubt executives are going to accept slower release and sale cycles in order to provide better support.
If anything, I expect this trend to accelerate. I’m imagining the opposite, a plethora of AI slop with increasingly burned-out engineers.
Sales are out of their control.
If there’s a market for quality and you don’t have it, sales are going down no matter what the PHB wants.
If there’s not, watch out for the vibe-coded competitor.
yes!So it's not just me. In terms of how intelligent they want to be OpenAI is at the top, then Claude. And actually when I was playing with Sol it meant that many tasks it would just try to do something else because it thought I don't know what I want. Even trying to nudge it back in the right direction wouldn't work.
I guess the models just have the cultures of their creatures.
DS is miles better than GLM in this regard. I wanted to add that as PC is planning to go to GLM next.
It would just loop on things and go down rabbit holes more. DS flash has been so consistently good I've kinda settled on it for 90% of my work.
I still use adversarial review for bigger changes where I want to make sure any issues are caught early, but I genuinely feel as tho if no new models ever get made I'd be fine with just using DS forever.
Keeps repeating things I settled as accepted or rejected. But what really gets on my nerves? The language it uses – that aweful, useless typical LLM languages! No AGENTS.md instruction, no per session instruction, no just two-prompts-prior instruction seems to work, hell sometimes instruction regarding that in same prompt doesn't work. GOOD/BAD example along with instruction don't work. That wastes time and zones you out! Not to mention the fatigue of to and fro. DS has been working much better. Hell Gemini 3.1 Pro works so much better than GLM. I don't have extended experience with OpenAI and Anthromic models but the free claide.ai works quite well and better than GLM 5.3 (not even flash). Albeit I must say I rarely use claude.ai for coding, but technical tasks? All the time!
GLM's best response: "No excuse. My fault. You exactly asked me not to do exactly that and so did the AGENTS.md. I failed". Love it. Except that if I press I will get that response every 5 prompts.
I like giving precise instructions,”update function xx to support input yy, add tests”. There is no reason for 10 turns and 5 minutes of waiting.
DS just handles ambiguity and my bursts of detail with much more grace. I'm only using "max effort" and the CoT is reasonable compared to GLM.
This really depends on the provider, it's a very fast model with ours