I know no one here wants to hear it, but the newest models from Anthropic and OpenAI are not bad coders with proper direction. If used correctly they can be positive force multipliers for developers, and used incorrectly they can do a lot of damage.
Note that this goes for developers with some experience. If you try to use an LLM in place of experience, or use it as a shortcut to try to gain experience, it turns into a negative multiplier really quickly, and you probably build bad habits that are hard to kick.
I’m not sure what the future of coding looks like, but I’ll be very surprised if AI in its current or a future incarnation is not involved somehow. How to learn coding correctly for that I don’t know, but looking at the junior devs I know, I am sure they will figure it out and grow into AI-native senior devs in due time.
Gpt 5.4 xhigh isn’t too bad for automated reviews and the like, and 5.5 is fairly efficient for interactive coding. I prefer those to Claude and opus, the Anthropic models feel like they’re trying to hard to be human to me, but that’s personal preference I guess.
Yeah, it’s not free (or the free models aren’t good enough), but the consensus at work is that this is a potential game changer, and we need to experiment to see what works and what doesn’t. So, the budget is there until things settle, and afterwards if things work out.