An AI agent coding skeptic tries AI agent coding, in excessive detail

Max Woolf (@minimaxir), a data scientist at BuzzFeed, produces a long and thorough post putting Claude Code and Codex through their paces from the perspective of someone who hasn't been super impressed by these offerings historically. It's one of a growing number of posts by agentic coding skeptics that acknowledge that, no, really things have changed.

The real annoying thing about Opus 4.6/Codex 5.3 is that it’s impossible to publicly say “Opus 4.5 (and the models that came after it) are an order of magnitude better than coding LLMs released just months before it” without sounding like an AI hype booster clickbaiting, but it’s the counterintuitive truth to my personal frustration.

I really appreciate Max’s willingness to update his priors and post this and wholeheartedly agree with his conclusion that the discourse has become mostly toxic and unhelpful.

All we can do is keep open minds and keep experimenting.