I just don't understand what other people are seeing, I've mainly used Claude and ChatGPT, I got a free trial for premium but it's just underwhelming, their only use so far for me has been as a search engine, but they're a search engine that's wrong 20% of the time so even that use is questionable.
Now, we have better knowledge of prompting as people have learnt what to say, models are better, models make use of memory from other conversations, they have skills written by humans or even themselves on how to do things, access to the internet to get live info, access to project files to check info, and the built in 'thinking' to challenge their own assumptions and loop on outputs until its refined.
You're right that output is always off still, but a lot of people have reached a point where it's only 'off' by an amount that is less than the effort required to do the task themselves, and considerably so.
My example today is prompting Claude to do a technical audit of a new client site.
It has skills for UX and SEO audits. Connects to an SEO tool. Pulls client info from OneDrive. Outputs to Word from a template for our agency. I even had it drive a remote pagespeed testing tool in Chrome because they don't have an MCP server currently.
Doing that report myself is 3.5-7 hours depending on what's found. Claude did it in 0.5 hours. Now I'm sorting out the oddities and anything that feels 'off'. I know and understand the full content of the report and can get on with actioning the recommendations or prioritising them for others. I've got maybe 1 hour of review and writing to do. It's not a 10x improvement but I'm happy with it.
Although, whilst Claude did it's bit I was doing other work. So, perhaps the multiplier is higher than I give it credit for.
Recently I tried to get Claude to write a script that produces large amounts of code so I could profile a compiler. The script ended up outputing code that uses variables outside of their scope, didn't utilize like 90% of the features of the language, and basically ended up being something that I could make by spamming copy paste.
The script itself was also written in really weird way, utilizing recursion for pretty much everything when most of what it did could be done in simple loops. It ended up being a bit of a nightmare to fix and the entire time I was asking myself "why didn't I just write this in 30 minutes instead of going through all of this".
I’ve found the latter works way better
Browsing sites, linking up data, spotting anomalies, writing documentation, formatting documents, etc.
If a task isn't repetitive or doesn't involve ingesting data, then I think the time savings shrink rapidly and the need for oversight increases massively. I think some people are managing to set up enough automated oversight to get round that, but it's adding a layer that multiplies your token usage to do so and still has no guarantee. But certainly all these layers being added are increasing success rates.
Andrei Karpathy is speaking about barely coding now. He has a bias, a comment from him like that is marketing for Anthropic, but I believe he's found some groove with his setup to achieve that.
I think the current status quo this month in 2026 we're at a point where the best tips and tricks to get usable answers out of ChatGPT a year ago have been consolidated into what we know call memory and skills in Claude and other agent harness type systems. You might need to explore those more, in fact I think for Claude Code/Cursor there are even more layers for checking outputs that I've not even seen in Claude Desktop.
And I think your exact issue, and the experience of the vast volumes of people who share it with you, are an audience that the app makers want to better convince. The free tiers and marketing sites are going to step up their game gradually and there will be new features that lower failure rates even more.
Can you back up this claim? what do you mean exactly by "better knowledge" ?
dejan_kocic•10h ago