Sure, Opus is next level than Sonnet, but it still doesn't free OP from these handcuffs - It is reading the code, understanding it and making a mental model that's way more labour intensive.

The OP's problem was treating the situation as two extremes: Either write everything myself, or defer entirely to the AI and be forced to read it later.

I was trying to explain that this isn't how successful engineers use AI. There is a way to understand the code and what the AI is doing as you're working with it.

Writing a spec, submitting it to the AI (a second-tier model at that) and then being disappointed when it didn't do exactly what you wanted in a perfect way is a tired argument.

But when you write code by hand, you at least are there as it’s happening, which makes reading and understanding way easier.