[foobiekr]

Charitably, your low expectations are probably the source of your finding them acceptable.

It’s also possible - and you should not take this as an insult, it’s just the way it is - you may not know enough about the subjects of your interactions to really spot how wrong they are.

However the cases you list - brainstorming - don’t really care about wrong answers.

Coding is in the eye of the beholder, but for anything that isn’t junk glue code, scripts or low-complexity web stuff, I find the output of LLMs just short of horrendous.

[CuriouslyC]

The code that the best frontier models produce is definitely good if you prompt it with what you believe "good" means, with the caveat that code quality depends heavily on the language -- Python, Typescript/Javascript, Java and C are quite good, Rust, C++ and Go tend to be decent to weak depending on the specific model, and other languages are poor.

[foobiekr]

The C output is absolutely terrible. I cannot fathom an experienced C coder who has found otherwise for anything non trivial. The code is full of things like return from stack, poor buffer size discipline, etc.

[fellowniusmonk]

Yeah, I've had mixed results with Rust. Oddly it's been most helpful for me so far in getting Rust code running in WASM without having to know anything about WASM, which I have found delightful.