Earlier quoted context omitted.
This can't be understated. I started using it heavily earlier this summer and it felt like magic. Someone signing up now based on how I described my personal experiences with it then would think I was out of my mind . For technical tasks it has been a net negative for me for the last several weeks. (Speaking of both Claude Code and the desktop app, both Sonnet and Opus >=4, on the Max plan.)
Have you considered perhaps that you are, indeed, out of your mind? Or more precisely, that you could be rationalizing what is essentially a random process? Based on the discussions here it seems that every model is either about to be great or was great in the past but now is not. Sucks for those of us who are stuck in the now , though.
You mean like our human brains and our entire bodies? We are the result of random processes.
>Sucks for those of us who are stuck in the now, though
I don't know what you are doing- but GPT5 is incredible. I literally spent 3 hours last night going back and forth on a project where I loaded some files for a somewhat complicated and tedious conversion between two data formats. And I was able to keep going back and forth and making the improvements incrementally and have AI do 90% of the actual tedious work.
To me it's incredible people don't seem to understand the CURRENT value. It has literally replaced a junior developer for me. I am 100% better off working with AI for all these tedious tasks than passing them off to someone off. We can argue all day if that's good for the world (it's not) but in terms of the current state of AI- it's already incredible.