Interesting point, I agree that things change so fast that experience from a few months ago is out of date. I'm sceptical there has been a real step change (especially based on the snippets I see claude 4 writing in answer to questions) but it never hurts to try again.

My most recent stab at this was Claude code with 3.7, circa March this year.

To be fair though, a big part of the issue for me is that having not done the work or properly thought through how a project is structured and how the code works, it comes back to bite later. A better model doesn't change this.

There has been a big change with Claude 4.0 in my opinion. Probably depends on your environment, but it’s the first time I’ve been able to get hundreds of lines of Python that just works when vibe coding a new project.

It’s still slower going as the codebase increases in size, and this is my hypothesis for the huge variance; I was getting giddy at how fast I blew through the first 5 hours of a small project (perhaps in 30 mins with Claude) but quickly lost velocity when I started implementing tests and editing existing code.

If you give it another try, my goto right now is Sonnet 4 Thinking. There's a pretty massive difference in intelligence by switching from just plain 4 to 4 Thinking. It's still pretty fast, and I think hits the right balance between speed and useful intelligence.

However, at least in my experience, nothing beats o3 for raw intelligence. It's a little too slow to use as the daily driver though.

It's kind of fun seeing the models all have their various pros and cons.

> To be fair though, a big part of the issue for me is that having not done the work or properly thought through how a project is structured and how the code works, it comes back to bite later. A better model doesn't change this.

Yes, even as I start to leverage the tools more, I try to double down on my own understanding of the problem being solved, at least at a high level. Need to make sure you don't lose the plot yourself.