Be absolutely ruthless with technical debt. Opus is perfectly capable of producing idiomatic code in any mainstream language you please, but will seize on any opportunity to justify writing basically-python instead because that's "consistent" with the "convention". Deprive it of that excuse.
I also work on a large complex rust project (>1M LOC) with extensive use of Claude Code. It is very consistent with my experience. Claude frequently subverts the obvious intent of the system - whether that's expressed in comments or types - in the pursuit of "making the build green", as it so often puts it. It, like many junior engineers, has completely failed to internalize the lesson that type errors are useful information and not a bad thing to make go away as soon as possible. It is remarkably capable, but you cannot trust it to have good taste.
Yes, and? Something can be both scare and inadequate to a given task. FAANG L5s cost a pretty penny but I wouldn't trust a random one to prove a crypto library correct.
Agreed that we're not at saturation, but we don't have a canonical "best" either. For example ChatGPT 5.5 + Codex is, in my experience, vastly superior to Opus 4.7 + Claude Code at sufficiently well-specified Haskell, but equally vastly inferior at correctly inferring my intent. Deepseek may well have its own niche, though I haven't used it enough to guess what it might be.
You're presuming too much about what OP's quality standards are. Can SOTA models outperform the average junior engineer? Yes, obviously. Can they match the best human engineers, if those humans were given all the time and interest in the world? Equally obviously not.
I use hundreds of millions of tokens a month, and LLMs have completely transformed the way I work. They're also, frankly, pretty mid programmers.
I do this for debugging. Models are extremely vulnerable to framing effects and it's usually easier to spin up a fresh instance than it is to get an existing one to generate new hypotheses.
> The C that shows up in quantum mechanics is likely an example of this--it's a case of physics having a a circular symmetry embedded in it (the phase of the wave functions) and everyone getting attached to their favorite way of writing it
No, it really is C, not R^2. Consider product spaces, for example. C^2 ⊗ C^2 is C^4 = R^8, but R^4 ⊗ R^4 is R^16 - twice as large. So you get a ton of extra degrees of freedom with no physical meaning. You can quotient them out identifying physically equivalent states - but this is just the ordinary construction of the complex numbers as R^2/(x^2 + 1).
> but rather, physics uses C because C models the algebra of the thing physics is describing.
That's what C is: R^2, with extra algebraic structure.
> As long as you’re able to sell those shares immediately
You can't. Trades in even the most liquid private companies can still take weeks to close, if not longer. Add on the transfer restrictions that Anthropic almost certainly has, and you're going to be holding those shares for a long time.