aren't you conflating being 10x as smart with code that is 10x more complicated?

the relationship should be the opposite, the smartest people can write the most readable solutions

Maybe. I can’t imagine what kind of solutions a software engineer who is 10x smarter than any human who has ever lived would be like by definition. All I know is that there is a possibility it says that the most optimal way to solve a problem is too clever for me to understand and as long as I must verify its work I must be able to understand fully the code it writes.

Of course perhaps at that point I really do become more of a spec and prompt engineer and don’t actually look at the code any more than I look at the assembly code produced from my programs now. But still my gut says using hyperintelligence to do common tasks is all positive.

4.8 is demonstrating simplicity, hence its smarter?? It just refactored my 4.6 generated code (4.8 is very slow on difficult tasks - urgh! - without burning tokens - yey!) but the output was wow! Simple, elegant and exactly what i wanted to see.