Claude and Codex produce far more polished work than any of my side projects. Are they competitive with entire teams of professional developers working on standard (multi-week) project development schedules? I don't know. But it's weird to suggest that "unpolished" is their big problem.

If anything: too polished!

(Like the words in this blog post, by the way).

Polished turds maybe. Making something actually good (stable, intuitive, not lying to you in some way) still requires a lot of attention and effort.