To me, the Claude superfans like yourself are the religious, like how you run around poffering unsubstantiated claims like this and believe in / anthropomorphize way too much. Is it because Anthrop'ic is an abbreviation of Anthropomorphic?
The caveat is that we have to be fairly good at steering them in the right direction, as things stand today. It is exhaustive to do it the right way.
I disagree that they are really really capable engineers et al. They have moments where they shine like one. They also have moments where they perform worse than a new grad/hire. This is not what a really really capable engineer looks like. I don't see this fundamental changing, even with all the improvements we are seeing. It's lower level and more core than something adding more layers on top can resolve, that a only addresses best it can
Do you have fail hards to share along with your wins? Are we going to only share our wins like stonk hussies?
These incidents have been less and less over the last year - switching it Opus made failure frequencies less. Same thing for code reviews. Most of it is fluff, but it does give useful feedback, if the instructions are good. For example, I asked for a blind code review of a PR ("Review this PR"), and it gave some generic commentary. I made the prompt more specific ("Follow the API changes across modules and see impact") - it found a serious bug.
The number of times I had to give up in frustration has been going down over the last one year. So I tend believe a swarm of agents could do a decent job of autonomous development/maintenance over the next few years.