I used to think this way too, and I believe myself to have high standards about this kind of thing.

But with the very latest models (like, Opus 5.5 class and up), I am now of the opinion that the output, in non-creative situations like code review and most software development, is fine. Great, even. Better than the reviews a lot of humans generate.

Honestly, if you’re at all open minded about this, get a $20 Claude Pro subscription for a month (they are easy to cancel) and ask Claude Code with Opus 5.5 to review your codebase or a PR or two. I was very (pleasantly? unpleasantly?) surprised.

I have complex emotions about this (‘sad’ on balance I think - although it’s definitely not all simply in that direction), but I can’t deny it to myself.

I still bristle at reading articles and even documentation that’s not just ‘reference’ documentation written by it - and even that can get a bit weird and circuitous. But for review and coding? It’s great.