That make sense. Let me ask you this When the project reaches a level of complexity . Do you simply reach for better models or do you reengineer it or does the project scope stop at the egdge of the model's capabilities.

I am asking because in my personal projects after a while they becomes a giant messy ball of wires and i basically trust the model to untangle it for me , by the time it untangles properly, I run into my token limits.

With Opus 5 / Fable / gpt-5.6 you can simply ask them to fan out subagents to look for ideal architectural simplifications and rank their findings by impact vs confidence.

You can swap out "architectural simplification" with performance opportunities, bugs, correctness, etc. I get the orchestrator agent to then itemize it all into a file where I can keep track of which ones I've implemented.

The results are pretty astounding. I run these right before my weekly limits reset for each subscription and the findings will dictate the secondary tasks I get done during the week.

It's definitely token-heavy. I'm on the $200/mo Claude Code sub and the $100/mo Codex sub.

But it's pretty clear to me that software engineering is more or less solved and all you need is enough patience + tokens to get what you want. I think 20 years of engineering experience more lets me save on tokens rather than unlock things nobody else can build.

An example of the scope of one of my AI-engineered projects is a iterm2/ghostty-like terminal app that implements its own pty session, parsing, rendering. It's almost 2000 commits right now.

That said, I have a specific workflow that isn't just a blind "ok now make it so a screen can be split into panes". I have a plan phase focused on coming up with ideal invariants and such. But I'm not sure anymore how much of that is useful vs just yoloing a solution and then paying technical debt in sweeps, like garbage collection.

Every time I try to use a lower tier model like Terra or Sonnet I regret it, so I just use the best one the first time to keep my sanity (it sort of works). Same with effort, you gotta just max it out (though I stopped using Ultra/Ultracode) and I never use fast because I'd rather work in parallel on more than on one thing faster almost always.