Could there be a less egregious version of that in the code? Sure, but then that's just a normal bug where implementation doesn't match intention, and that happens to human developers as well. I find that Opus 5.5 is so good that it writes pretty good code that follows YAGNI, KISS, DRY, and is fine with writing a lot of tests, so my sense is that the rate of normal bugs is actually lower than with human developers.

Now, if you're assuming malintent on the side of the model creators, well, that's another story. FWIW, in a commercial project, where I also work at the "engineering director level" since Opus 5.5, all non-trivial changes go through reviews by Codex and Grok (locally) and Greptile (on the PR), so there would have to be some serious level of collusion by the labs to produce your example ;)

I feel like a good chunk of my skills that I honed over decades as a software engineer are obsolete: programming, debugging, navigating code. But there are other skills and especially experiences that, at least with the current level of tools, allow me to do much more than someone who doesn't have them: knowing what computers can and cannot do, or only inefficiently; distributed systems; deployment; CI/CD pipelines.

And like with a team, many programs could meet what I asked for, but I check the behavior of what they built, not the code directly. I think of it as working on the level of an engineering director, who also doesn't review code directly. Each agent shows me its change running in the app, in a short narrated screen recording, like in a launch review for the director. When it's not what I meant, I say what, and it goes another round.

About 6 months ago, I mostly stopped reading the code. And since a few weeks, I also stopped testing the changes manually. Before, it felt like I was the agents' QA department. Now, each agent shows me its change running in the app, in a short narrated screen recording. A fix takes me 30 seconds to watch. When something is off, I say what, and the agent goes another round.