Thing is. You can find an extremely similar paragraph written about Claude 4.x or some equivalent gpt. And simultaneously, many people expressing their frustration and the shortcomings of <insert any model>

“But it’s different this time” - several people, several times over the last couple of years.

This is not at all a dig at you, I’m very sorry if it reads that way. My point is these things only get truly better in anecdotes. The ways in which they fail is yet to change. Just yesterday I had gpt 5.3 generate completely awful code for the Cinema 4D Python API. Also an anecdote. But for all of the people saying they are truly intelligent and truly reason, they still make obvious mistakes, write around problems, fail entirely at architectural decisions, fail at random, generate FAR too much code.

And no amount of harnesses, methodologies, loops make much of a difference. If you listen to people on the internet they say it’s all working. You listen to people on the job and they mostly say it’s creating tech debt and a review bottleneck. Also burnout, so much burnout.

I think LLMs are mediocre. I think it’s fine they’re mediocre. You can work with low expectations. But the hype cycles are so tiresome.

I believe it is a widely accepted opinion that agentic coding took off with Opus 4.5 late in 2025.

Why would you attempt to use GPT 5.3 to generate code today and form an opinion on that basis?

I do not think it is even still available in Codex, I believe it only has the smaller, distilled GPT 5.3 Codex Spark.