[lukan]

I don't have the answer here.

I just know, that if I would point a average human to a messy old codebase, he or she would just shrug helplessly. Even most programmers.

But if I tell claude to start digging in, refactor, update outdated tools .. it produces results. So there is some "understanding" I don't know how else to call it. So surely it is not a general intelligence, but it is certainly useful.

[neonstatic]

I think what you are describing is the actual usefulness of the tech. It can do some things and, contrary to humans, it doesn't get demotivated or uninterested, it's a machine.

I will stick to my earlier statement (I hope I made it in this thread) - it seems to be treating blocks of texts as concepts and tries to compose those concepts like lego blocks. It is quite amazing that it can transform characters into meanings, even if it doesn't really understand these meanings, then compose them. I just don't think that's enough to call it intelligent (but certainly it's enough to find it useful for some tasks, as you point out).