I've used a bunch of the SOTA models (via my work's Windsurf subscription) for HTML/CSS/JS stuff over the past few months. Mind you, I am not a web developer, these are just internal and personal projects.

My experience is that all of the models seem to do a decent job of writing a whole application from scratch, up to a certain point of complexity. But as soon as you ask them for non-trivial modifications and bugfixes, they _usually_ go deep into rationalized rabbit holes into nowhere.

I burned through a lot of credits to try them all and Gemini tended to work the best for the things I was doing. But as always, YMMV.

> I can't believe how bad it is

This has been my consistent experience with every model prior to Opus 4.5, and every single open model I've given a go.

Hopefully we will get there in another 6 months when Opus is distilled into new open models, but I've always been shocked at some of the claims around open models, when I've been entirely unable to replicate them.

Hell, even Opus 4.5 shits the bed with semi-regularity on anything that's not completely greenfield for my usage, once I'm giving it tasks beyond some unseen complexity boundary.

Amazingly, just yesterday, I had Opus 4.5 crap itself extensively on a fairly simple problem -- it was trying to override a column with an aggregation function while also using it in a group-by without referring to the original column by its full qualified name prefixed with the table -- and in typical Claude fashion it assembled an entire abstraction layer to try and hide the problem under, before finally giving up, deleting the column, and smugly informing me I didn't need it anyway.

That evening, for kicks, I brought the problem to GLM 4.7 Flash (Flash!) and it one-shot the right solution.

It's not apples to apples, because when it comes down to it LLMs are statistical token extruders, and it's a lot easier to extrude the likely tokens from an isolated query than from a whole workspace that's already been messed up somewhat by said LLM. That, and data is not the plural of anecdote. But still, I'm easily amused, and this amused me. (I haven't otherwise pushed GLM 4.7 much and I don't have a strong opinion about about it.)

But seriously, given the consistent pattern of knitting ever larger carpets to sweep errors under that Claude seems to exhibit over and over instead of identifying and addressing root causes, I'm curious what the codebases of people who use it a lot look like.