I don't generally switch to implementing myself on the model, although there are definitely times where I stop it and correct it mid-task.

It's prone to thinking longer and more repetitively, again - it's definitely not opus 4.7/4.8.

I've been using pi.dev as my harness for it, and been pleasantly surprised by how nice it feels (I have used aider, but only very briefly and quite a while back - so I can't realistically compare).

I would say it's roughly where I felt claude was a year back - Most of the sessions need to be more "pair programming" and less "I let it run for hours".

I'm a big fan of frequent "human in the loop" style workflows even when I'm on something like opus at work, though. I have opinions about lots of things, and re-inforcing that the model should stop and ask frequently seems to get me considerably better output, without having to "re-roll" if you will.

I've done a good bit of management, and I think it's roughly producing what a junior dev might produce in a day every 5 minutes. And just like a junior dev, you need to be steering it back on track fairly often.

Opus feels more like a mid-level at this point. I can hand it a chunk of work and "leave" but I still get better output if I'm checked-in and watching/steering.