Yeah, the latest models are really good. For implementing leetcode-type solutions, Claude Opus is smarter than essentially all engineers I've ever worked with and smarter than me as well. The one area where I beat it hands-down is technical decision-making; it sucks at architecture, maintainability, performance and scalability.

Agency seems to correlate with the ability to make good decisions. It's kind of surprising how much agency is required to make good technical decisions. It's not even about business domain knowledge; a lot of agency is needed even in a pure tech context.