Codex does better if you ask it to take screenshots and critique its own UI work and iterate. It rarely one-shots something I like but it can get there in steps.
I've had exactly the opposite experience. Getting great results using GPT for hours every day since 5.3. You need to put the effort level on at least high though.
Every time I hand off a task to Opus to see if it's gotten better I'm disappointed. At least 4.7 seems to have realized I have skill files again though.
That hasn’t been my experience. I agree Opus has the edge but it’s not by that much and I still sometimes get better results from Gemini, especially when debugging issues.
Claude Code is much better than Gemini CLI though.
I really don't know how effective LLMs are at that but also that puts you in an extremely narrow niche of development, so you should keep that in mind when making much more general claims about how useful they are.
Why is that the real metric? If you can turn a 1x dev into a 2x dev that's a huge deal, especially if you can also turn the original 2x dev into a 4x dev.
And far from "churning out code" my work is better with LLMs. Better tested, better documented, and better organized because now I can do refactors that just would have taken too much time before. And more performant too because I can explore more optimization paths than I had time to before.
Refusing to use LLMs now is like refusing to use compilers 20 years ago. It might be justified in some specific cases but it's a bad default stance.
This kind of take I find genuinely baffling. I can't see how anybody working with current frontier models isn't finding them a massive performance boost. No they can't replace a competent developer yet, but they can easily at least double your productivity.
Careful code review and a good pull request flow are important, just as they were before LLMs.
SwiftUI on macOS 26 still has issues but it’s finally starting to evolve into something usable. In particular it seems like the long standing performance problems are being addressed.