Yes, nothing to write home about. It's all relative of course, what stack, what goal, what approach on which models perform best, but for regular day-to-day coding, I do not find it usable given alternatives.

Kimi, Mimimax and GLM models provide far more robust coding assistance at sometimes no cost (financed via data sharing) or for very cheap. Output quality, tool calling reliability and task adherence tend to be far more reliable across all three over Mercury 2, so if you consider the time to get usable code including reviews, manual fixes, different prompting attempts, etc. end-to-end you'll be faster.

Only "coding" task I have found Mercury 2 to have a place for code generation is a browser desktop with simple generated applets. Think artefacts/canvas output but via a search field if the applet has been generated previously.

With other models, I need to hide the load behind a splash screen, but with Mercury 2 it is so fast that it can feel frictionless. The demo at this point is limited by the fact that venturing beyond a simple calculator or todo list, the output becomes unpredictable and I struggle to get Mercury 2 to rely on pre-made components, etc. to ensure consistent appearance and a11y.

Despite the benchmarks, cost and speed figure suggesting something different, I have had the best overall results with Haiku 4.5, simply because GPT-5.4-nano is still unwilling to play nice with my approach to UI components. I am currently experimenting with some routing, using different models for different complexity, then using loading spinners only for certain models, but even if that works reliably, any model that I cannot force to rely on UI components in a consistent manner isn't gonna work, so for the time being it'd just route between less expensive and more expensive Anthropic models.

Coding wise, one more exception can be in-line suggestions, though I have no way to fairly compare that because the tab models I know about (like Cursors) are not available via API, but Mercury 2 seems to perform solidly there, at least in Zed for a TS code base.

Basically, whether code or anything else, unless your task is truly latency dependent, I believe there are better options out there. If it is, Mercury 2 can enable some amazing things.