If you're trying to one shot stuff with a few sentences then yes you might be using these things wrong. I've seen people with PhDs fail to use google successfully to find things, were they idiots? If you're using them wrong you're using them wrong - I don't care how smart you are in other areas. If you can't hand off work knowing someones capabilities then that's a thing you can't do - and that's ok. I've known unbelievably good engineers who couldn't form a solid plan to solve a business problem or collaboratively work to get something done to save their life. Those are different skills. But gpt5-codex and sonnet 4 / 4.5 can solidly write code, gpt-5-pro with web search can really dig into things, and if you can manage what they can do you can hand off work to them. If you've only ever worked with juniors with a feeling of "they slow everything down but maybe someday they'll be as useful as me" then you're less likely to succeed at this.

Let's do a quick overview of recent chats for me:

* Identifying and validating a race condition in some code

* Generating several approaches to a streaming issue, providing cost analyses of external services and complexity of 3 different approaches about how much they'd change the code

* Identifying an async bug two good engineers couldn't find in a codebase they knew well

* Finding performance issues that had gone unnoticed

* Digging through synapse documentation and github issues to find a specific performance related issue

* Finding the right MSC for a feature I wanted to use but didn't know existed - and then finding the github issue that explained how it was only half implemented and how to enable the experimental other part I needed

* Building a bunch of UI stuff for a short term contract I needed, saving me a bunch of hours and the client money

* Going through funding opportunities and matching them against a charity I want to help in my local area

* Building a search integration for my local library to handle my kids reading challenge

* Solving a series of VPN issues I didn't understand

* Writing a lot of astro related python for an art project to cover the loss of some NASA images I used to have access to.

> the folks pushing or better said

If you don't want to trust them, don't. Also don't believe the anti-hype merchants who want to smugly say these tools can't do a god damn thing. They're trying to get attention as well.