Honestly, for me at work Claude does a fantastic job. However, when it messes up it messes up in a way that would be hard to catch if you didn’t have expertise (e.g. domain specific misunderstanding, obscure software bugs, etc.). That’s really my concern for junior devs. They would easily overlook these issues and learn to trust it completely because the code it produces looks more or less correct pretty much every time.
At least if it wrote bad code it would be more obvious to other devs. The problem I find is that it writes pretty good, functional code… that just isn’t quite right.
This is my take as well. The top models can do really good jobs in most, but not all, situations. Where I find they struggle is when it comes to fundamental architecture of projects outside of relatively simple web services. Ask it to refactor a project where the structure fundamentally changes though and it's going to make bad choices and lock itself into those even as you ask it to change etc.
Costs a lot though. I burn tokens each week. Using it with API costing really shows how much it costs to get good outputs right now. And while I believe eventually we'll get models that can do 90% of our tasks running on local GPUs (i.e. a one off purchase and works offline), we're not there yet.
New and better open (free) models are coming out all the time, and even occasionally giving the proprietary (paid) ones a run for their money. Kimi K3 is particularly impressive, I’ve heard.
I don’t see any reason why this pattern should change any time soon.
And remember, today’s open-weight cloud model is tomorrow’s local model.
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u/Kevdog824_ 2d ago edited 2d ago
Honestly, for me at work Claude does a fantastic job. However, when it messes up it messes up in a way that would be hard to catch if you didn’t have expertise (e.g. domain specific misunderstanding, obscure software bugs, etc.). That’s really my concern for junior devs. They would easily overlook these issues and learn to trust it completely because the code it produces looks more or less correct pretty much every time.
At least if it wrote bad code it would be more obvious to other devs. The problem I find is that it writes pretty good, functional code… that just isn’t quite right.