I have a similar amount of engineering experience, was highly skeptical, and I've come to similar conclusions with Claude Code after spending two weeks on a greenfield project (TS api, react-native client, TS/React admin panel).
As I've improved planning and context management, the results have been fairly consistent. As long as I can keep a task within the context window, it does a decent job almost every time. And occasionally I have to have it brute-force its way to green lint/typecheck/tests. That's been one of the biggest speed bumps.
I've found that gemini is great at the occasional detailed code-review to help find glaring issues or things that were missed, but having it implement anything has been severely lacking. I have to literally tell it not to do anything because it will gladly just start writing files on a whim. I generally use the opus model to write detailed plans, sonnet to implement, and then opus and gemini to review and plan refactors.
I'm impressed. The progress is SLOW. I'd have gotten to the stage I'm at in 1/3 to 1/2 the time, likely with fewer tests and significantly less process documentation. But the results are otherwise fairly great. And the learning process has kept me motivated to keep this old side-project moving.
I was switching between two accounts for a week while testing, but in the end upgraded to the $100/month plan and I think I've been rate-limited once since. I don't know if I'll be using this for every-day professional work, but I think it's a great tool for a few categories of work.
As I've improved planning and context management, the results have been fairly consistent. As long as I can keep a task within the context window, it does a decent job almost every time. And occasionally I have to have it brute-force its way to green lint/typecheck/tests. That's been one of the biggest speed bumps.
I've found that gemini is great at the occasional detailed code-review to help find glaring issues or things that were missed, but having it implement anything has been severely lacking. I have to literally tell it not to do anything because it will gladly just start writing files on a whim. I generally use the opus model to write detailed plans, sonnet to implement, and then opus and gemini to review and plan refactors.
I'm impressed. The progress is SLOW. I'd have gotten to the stage I'm at in 1/3 to 1/2 the time, likely with fewer tests and significantly less process documentation. But the results are otherwise fairly great. And the learning process has kept me motivated to keep this old side-project moving.
I was switching between two accounts for a week while testing, but in the end upgraded to the $100/month plan and I think I've been rate-limited once since. I don't know if I'll be using this for every-day professional work, but I think it's a great tool for a few categories of work.