> Personally, I think it really shines at doing the boring maintenance and tech debt work.
It shines at doing the boring maintenance and tech debt work for web. My experiences with it, as a firmware dev, have been the diametric opposite of yours. The only model I've had any luck with as an agent is Sonnet 4 in reasoning mode. At an absolutely glacial pace, it will sometimes write some almost-correct unit tests. This is only valuable because I can have it to do that while I'm in a meeting or reading emails. The only reason I use it at all is because it's coming out of my company's pocket, not mine.
For sure. There's tons of training data in the models for the JS and TS language and the specific tasks I outlined, but not specifically just the web, I have several Node or Bun + Typescript + SQLite CLI utilities that it also helps with. I definitely pick my battles and lean in to what it works best for though. Anything it appears to struggle at I'll just do manually and develop it like we always did. It's rarely not a net positive to me but it's very frequently a negligible improvement. Anything that doesn't pay off in spades I typically don't try again until new models release or new tools or approaches are available.
If you're doing JS/Python/Ruby/Java, it's probably the best at that. But even with our stack (elixir), it's not as good as, say, React/NextJS, but it's definitely good enough to implement tons of stuff for us.
And with a handful of good CLAUDE.md or rules files that guide it in the right direction, it's almost as good as React/NextJS for us.
It shines at doing the boring maintenance and tech debt work for web. My experiences with it, as a firmware dev, have been the diametric opposite of yours. The only model I've had any luck with as an agent is Sonnet 4 in reasoning mode. At an absolutely glacial pace, it will sometimes write some almost-correct unit tests. This is only valuable because I can have it to do that while I'm in a meeting or reading emails. The only reason I use it at all is because it's coming out of my company's pocket, not mine.