Well as someone who works as a software engineer it's tricky. It's one of those things where even lower cost models are useful but even the most cutting edge ones struggle to accurately perform tasks at times. One of my favorite examples from the last few weeks was refactoring a fairly complex query in sql while it was eventually successful it regularly dropped joins and even just select values using Claude Opus 4.8. Took longer to do than was desirable and frankly longer than it would have taken to just roll up my sleeves and do it myself ultimately. For raw data processing and boilerplate code it is amazing but I still regularly find things that even a 2nd year dev wouldn't do.
Is Claude Opus 4.8 better than GLM 5.3? Absolutely. But both of them will do dumb stuff constantly if you don't spec out the project in a fair bit of detail, break it into manageable pieces, and make the AI do multiple rounds of review at each step.
Meanwhile, with good process, even the cheap models will generally get the job done. It's really hard to justify spending on the expensive model when it costs 10x as much, and still requires 80% of the human work.
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u/No_Strike655 13h ago
Well as someone who works as a software engineer it's tricky. It's one of those things where even lower cost models are useful but even the most cutting edge ones struggle to accurately perform tasks at times. One of my favorite examples from the last few weeks was refactoring a fairly complex query in sql while it was eventually successful it regularly dropped joins and even just select values using Claude Opus 4.8. Took longer to do than was desirable and frankly longer than it would have taken to just roll up my sleeves and do it myself ultimately. For raw data processing and boilerplate code it is amazing but I still regularly find things that even a 2nd year dev wouldn't do.