I’ve had some luck prompting them to be concise, both in writing and in code, and with code doing an approach where they get it working, write tons of tests, and then refactor for conciseness and readability. All the tests prevent regressions doing this.

Without such prompting and a conciseness and clarity pass you get a slop grenade.

They overall work better with tests, and Rust is a great language for them. Overall they do better with lots of walls and alarms that go off if they mess up. I don’t need nearly as much of this, can mentally simulate it, which is a good “are we superintelligence yet” reality check. Still not even as good as my wet meat brain. But impressive given what was possible even two years ago!

The result is still not as clean as a good programmer but it’s better than the slop grenade you get first pass.