Claude is certainly able to make a superhuman mess. All of its efficacy still hinges upon good architecture and programming principles, which do not seem to be instilled in the model by anything other than luck
2) with detailed, WELL NUMBERED (Claude is remarkably good at following number references), multi-level design and build documentation Claude absolutely CAN produce moderately complex applications (crud with some lightly branching business workflows).
The corollary to (2) however is can you actually get that working code to be production grade, AND maintain it? that far I haven't got yet.
But this is only possible because I have created a completely new python development workflow with fixed formatting, style, and unification of tooling around uv. We’ve also split our projects into smaller repos, some which function as libraries and some which are applications depending on those libraries.
I think the key to success here is to limit what context is required to do development. I’d say it’s slightly more on the extreme side of “modular” than a codebase I would write otherwise