It's also the feeling I have, opus is not a ground-breaking model by any means.

However, Opus 4.5 is incredible when you give it everything it needs, a direction, what you have versus what you want and it will make it work, really, it will work. The code might me ugly, undesirable, would only work for that one condition, but with futher prompting you can evolve it and produce something that you can be proud of.

Opus is only as good as the user and the tools the user gives to it. Hmm, that's starting to sound kind-of... human...

Off/nearshoring regularly produces worse code. I’ve seen it first hand.

Opus can produce beatiful code. It can outcode a good programmer. But getting it to do this reliably is something I've gotten better at over the last year; it's a skill that took quite a bit of practice.

I now write very long specifications and this helps. I haven't figured out a bulletproof workflow, I think that will take years. But I often get just amazing code out of it.