Benchmaxxing is the word you're reaching for here (though code golf is a perfect name for the symptom). At work I use Codex CLI with GPT 5.4 - it hits a sweet spot: capable enough that it'll do the right thing most of the time, but unsophisticated enough that I can follow along with what it's doing and cut it off and go, "Nope! That's wrong because x, try y instead." For users like me, the threshold for PMF was never "Do I trust it to run unsupervised" but rather "Is supervising it faster than doing it myself" - and as the models get more sophisticated, they actually go backward on this. Most importantly: a bunch of open weights models hit that sweet spot around the same time - I've been having a go with OpenCode and GLM 5.3 on side projects at home and guess what.
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Benchmaxxing is the word you're reaching for here (though code golf is a perfect name for the symptom). At work I use Codex CLI with GPT 5.4 - it hits a sweet spot: capable enough that it'll do the right thing most of the time, but unsophisticated enough that I can follow along with what it's doing and cut it off and go, "Nope! That's wrong because x, try y instead." For users like me, the threshold for PMF was never "Do I trust it to run unsupervised" but rather "Is supervising it faster than doing it myself" - and as the models get more sophisticated, they actually go backward on this. Most importantly: a bunch of open weights models hit that sweet spot around the same time - I've been having a go with OpenCode and GLM 5.3 on side projects at home and guess what.