A concrete example: I was doing shader programming with Sonnet 3.5 and ran into a visual bug. Sonnet asked me to add four debugging modes, cycle through each one, and describe what I saw for each one. With one more prompt, it resolved the issue. In my experience, GPT-4o has never bothered proposing debug modes and just produced more buggy code.
For non-trivial coding, Sonnet 3.5 was miles above anything else, and I didn't even have to try hard.
If you're curious, I knew nothing about shader programming when I first played around. In that specific experiment, I wanted to see how far I could push Claude to implement shaders and how capable it is of correcting itself. In the end, I got a pretty nice dynamic lighting system with some cool features, such as cast shadows, culling, multiple shader passes, etc. Asking questions along the way taught me many things about computer graphics, which I later checked on different sources, it was like a tailored-made tutorial where I was "working" on exactly the kind of project I wanted.
i.e. there would be a lot of value if an AI could maintain a detailed understanding of say, the Linux kernel code base, when someone is writing a driver and actively prompt about possible misuses, bugs or implementation misunderstandings.
They might be able to debug it themselves, maybe they should be able to debug it themselves. But I feel like that is a completely different conversation.
What its best for is creating components and functions that are labor intensive but fairly standardized
Like if you have a CRUD app and want to add a bunch of filters, complete with a solid UI, you can hand over this to Sonnet and it will do a fine job right out of the box