> I’ve been using Copilot - and more recently Claude - as a sort of “spicy autocomplete” and occasional debugging assistant for some time, but any time I try to get it to do anything remotely clever, it completely shits the bed.

This seems like a really disingenuous statement. If claude can write an entire C compiler that is able to compile the linux kernel, I think it has already surpassed an unimaginable threshold for "cleverness"