Are the newest LLMs better than you at programming?

It is better at syntax and boilerplate. It writes cleaner code than I would have. But it is absolute shit at actually designing systems, in particular if you are integrating multiple platforms and stacks.

I am not sure better is the metric, that answer is definitely mostly no..but faster? absolutely.

They're still pretty dreadful. They're better than I was at 21, so I'd say they're good for graduate level, but nothing beyond that.

I don't use ChatGPT, but i've been using an agent with Claude Sonnet 4. My answer may not be useful to you, but i'll talk about my experience with that and hope it may help you.

So this AI Agent... It is much faster at doing code when given specific instructions. But it keeps loosing context on architecture, and i cant really let it build complex things with interdependencies that build on each other. At times it feels like doing pair programming with a guy who is so crazy fast that im left behind with my head spinning, wondering how we just jumped from a hello world to a working thing that would have taken me ten iterations. And i get a bad feel when i then wonder how is this app doing what it does? because my agent cant explain it, and i would be stupid to believe what it hallucinated because it sounds really solid until you scratch the construction.

At the beginning i was almost euphoric about my new friend, now im sometimes disappointed, sometimes confused, but i am learning to give better, more concise instructions, to do smaller development jumps. It is tempting to set a long haul goal and let it do. But, i think for now, even if it is much faster at the small things, it would be also faster to build a catastrophic spaghetti code nightmare if not used with great care.

Opus 4.6 (high) is doing for me things that i don't know to do myself. Moreover, I don't understand enough what it did after it did it. But it works. The domain is automated debugging and RE.

In my opinion, AI agents are currently just as capable as novice developers. Their main advantage is that they’re much faster than we are when the task involves generating a lot of code.

If the task is simple, I spend more time telling it what to do than doing it myself. But if the task is complex, I use certain skills/commands and create intermediate files (more than necessary) between each step (analysis, planning, design, workflow, and implementation) and clear the context between each of them. The result is fairly accurate, but not perfect.

My take is, we remain the architects of our code, and AI agents are an excellent tool that we need to master.