Yep, the goalposts just keep shifting. In reality: they still don't work well, unless you're content with producing low quality work.
I have had good results in that area with GPT 5.5 in the past.
On the subscription plan I don't use anything but xhigh effort and Fable, 5.6 Sol, or now also Opus 5.
Is that the class of model that struggles with Docker for you?
So whereas before my debugging time would have been spent in Rust docs looking up traits and such, these days I feel more like an AI therapist trying to figure out why it's not feeling up to task on any particular day. It can be anything from regular service outages to geopolitics that on any given day my workflow is fucked up.
In my before-AI workflow, I was never restricted from compiling Rust code because of concerns that Cargo is a national security threat. So you really have to broadly scope the notion of "reliability" with these AI tools; it's much larger than whether it can give a good output but whether it can do so consistently enough to depend on.
This just reads like another variation of “it’s the user not the tool,” which is just endless runway for always blaming people and never acknowledging the limitations of LLM’s.
I’d be curious to hear how the recipients of your work enabled by the “productivity multiplier” feel about the quality.
I would say that as of July 2026, with the right scaffolding, you can get reasonably good output out of a LLM, or better a combination of LLMs. For example, it pays off to prepare an implementation plan with one LLM and then let another LLM check it for flaws, then again. After several iterations like this, you will have a plan better than whatever you could come up with yourself.
It often is the user and not the tool. LLMs are complicated, have nontrivial failure modes, and the user needs to steer them carefully. They might be the most complicated tools on the planet right now.
Anecdotally, the recipients of my work have become visibly more happy in the last months. LLMs are great at diagnosing subtle problems which tend to appear at Friday night only, and this is the sort of problem that bugs actual people the most.
Totally agree, I don’t think I said or implied otherwise.
And yes can it can be the user and often even is, but when it comes to any LLM conversation I’ve been a part of it seems people think the only answer is “you’re using it wrong.” Evangelists swear it’s a 100x multiplier and anything counter to that means you’re either a Luddite who is blinded by politics or are too dumb to use the tool.
We actually have trendlines on user reported bugs, and I am happy to report they show a significant downtrend.
And even then, within a single group, you'll have multiple thresholds, of "this really helps make my coding more productive" to "I no longer type code, just review" to eventually "I'm no longer employed".
What they care about isn't software delivery, is physical goods or services that aren't related to software, for them software is a cost center.
I've been saying this for years.
Of course don’t let me assume, maybe you have a higher quality disproof for the Jacobian conjecture you could share with the class.