I don't know that it's a lie. The code that I can get Claude Sonnet to produce is pretty much what I would and that's two iterations behind. We've vibecoded scripts recently that genuinely are better than what I would have written and I don't think I'm terrible.
There are a lot of mediocre programmers aren't there, I wouldn't be surprised if on average Claude is doing better than what exists. It's not a "lie", anyways, just a point of view.
...are you sure that Claude Sonnet writes code that you'd write?
For me, it writes code that mostly works, which is great. It insists on adding some of the least readable comments I've seen. It also likes to pad out the code to about double or triple what I would write.
It doesn't seem to have that little voice that says "hey, this approach sucks" so it needs the harness or the prompter to tell it to go back and refactor. Even Fable and Opus struggle with this.
This. I hate that Claude Code is taking the fun part of my job, but the reality is that Claude Code Opus 5 can one-shot a script in 15 seconds that would have taken me 45 minutes to write.
I don't begrudge the business for making the prudent choice of making me use AI, I just sort of lament that what I spent years enjoying and getting good at was so utterly derivative that it was perfect for the LLMs. It would be insulting if it weren't just a fact.
> We've vibecoded scripts recently that genuinely are better than what I would have written and I don't think I'm terrible.
I'm ok with vibecoding scripts, I love programming the machine and making the end user happy and not dealing with bash! I don't judge scripts quality as long as they are tools in the workflow, I dont care about that, unless they will somehow be part of the production. The name Script implies that, there isn't any architecture and Claude Opus sucks at architecture