Between this and 4.6's tendency to do so much more "exploratory" work, I am back to using ChatGPT Codex for some tasks.

Two months ago, Claude was great for "here is a specific task I want you to do to this file". Today, they seem to be pivoting towards "I don't know how to code but want this feature" usage. Which might be a good product decision, but makes it worse as a substitute for writing the code myself.

I feel the exact same way. Trying to cater to the "no-code" crowd is blurring the product's focus. It seems they've stuffed the system prompt with "be creative and explore" instructions, which kills determinism - so now we have to burn tokens just to tell it: "Don't think, just write the code"

Have you played with the effort setting? I'm finding medium effort on 4.6 to give more satisfactory results for that kind of thing.