It can be like that, and other times it can spit out perfectly good work that similar jobs have taken me a week in the past in under an hour. Depends on the task, depends a bit on how you ask, and depends on the model. Claude Sonnet/Opus 4.5 and higher have gotten pretty good about actually saving time and producing useful results.
Except when trying to draw 3D cats in Blender, I can say with authority now: Opus 4.8 on High/Max thinking still can’t pin the tail on a cat correctly without a half dozen very specific annotated views showing it where it goes. It claims it’s having trouble because the cat is lying down… our cat lays down 22 hours a day, suck it up and learn what they look like already.
In my experience the time spent getting AI to do what I want can just be used to write good code in the first place.
It can be like that, and other times it can spit out perfectly good work that similar jobs have taken me a week in the past in under an hour. Depends on the task, depends a bit on how you ask, and depends on the model. Claude Sonnet/Opus 4.5 and higher have gotten pretty good about actually saving time and producing useful results.
Except when trying to draw 3D cats in Blender, I can say with authority now: Opus 4.8 on High/Max thinking still can’t pin the tail on a cat correctly without a half dozen very specific annotated views showing it where it goes. It claims it’s having trouble because the cat is lying down… our cat lays down 22 hours a day, suck it up and learn what they look like already.