Yesterday we had a tech town hall in Zoho where we did a code review of the C++ code generated by the Claude Opus 4.5 model. It went on for hours late evening. I now have a much clearer understanding of what these models do well: they are able to stitch together systems well, taking data from one system, reshape it and pass it to another system. There is often a lot of such "glue code" in these systems and that is not very complicated but it is very tedious. In general, AI models have "memorized" all the open source too and they are able to recall patterns from them (with some possibility of hallucination). They are also able to stitch various open source pieces together well. Our senior engineer had guided ("orchestrated" is the right word) this process. When the AI was stuck he helped "unstuck" it. This was a very vital contribution and without his experienced guidance, the AI output would not be useful. We examined several C++ files with thousands of lines of code in each, looking for what I consider complex code. Most of it was straightforward glue code and only a tiny part of it was complex. I suspect that the AI generated code tended to be needlessly verbose but I have to study it more to be sure. On the whole, I am both impressed and not super awed. I believe we can do better 😏