100% - you are very right. 4.6 is amazing for orchestration. I even built some tools around agent to agent contracting.

I use 4.6 as the brain and then handoff to a more rigid llm like GPT 5.2 or Opus 4.5

I think it’s kinda one of those YMMV metrics. I work for a large company around 80-100k employees and they are ranked on this list. The business unit I’m in is amazing and I truly feel that it’s a great place to work. But ask someone in a dying business unit how they feel and they’ll say they’re overworked and understaffed.

I have found this to be true too and I thought I was the only one. Everyone is praising 4.6 and while it’s great at agentic and tool use, it does not follow instructions as cleanly as 4.5 - I also feel like 4.5 was just way more efficient too

I think the 'AI productivity gap' is mostly a state management problem. Even with great models, you burn so much time just manually syncing context between different agents or chat sessions.

Until the handoff tax is lower than the cost of just doing it yourself, the ROI isn't going to be there for most engineering workflows.