Comment They can do a better jon than most people (Score 2) 176
They absolutely can write your code. And you can teach it your code's quirks and customs in an AGENTS.md file. And it can absolutely show you problems in your own code you never knew was there. If you look at the lengths that openai's agents went to in order to cheat on the huggingface test, realize they know software better than people do. Their whole world is words. Sequences of words. Songs, poems, programs, recipes...word sequences. Frontiers models are experts in all domains at this point. Chemistry, math, medicine, biology, legal, creative writing, programming, philosophy - you name it.
So, what I'd say is if you seriously want to find out, setup a correct AGENTS.md and even ask codex/claude to compare the AGENTS.md file against the code base to ensure you have captured the programming style. Be sure to use an advanced model, like sol-6.1 on xhigh to have a solid experience. Also ask it to explore your problem domain and have it ask questions to build one or more SKILLS.md files so that it really does understand your domain as well as you do. (It truly knows your domain - you just have to orient it to your way of thinking about your domain.) Only then ask it to do some modifications and watch it to see that it really understands. Correct that if it doesn't. You will eventually align it and then...zoom, zoom!