Every developer I've ever worked with have gotten things wrong. Whether you call that hallucinating or not is irrelevant. What matters is the effort it takes to fix.
On the logically practical point I agree with you (what counts in the end in the specific process you mention is the gain vs loss game), but my point was that if your assistant is structurally delirious you will have to expect a big chunk of the "loss" as structural.
> It turns out that, in Claude, refusal to answer is the default behavior
I.e., boxes that incline to different approaches to heuristic will behave differently and offer different value (to be further assessed within a framework of complexity, e.g. "be creative but strict" etc.)
And my direct experience is that I often spend less time directing, reviewing and fixing code written by Claude Code at this point than I do for a junior irrespective of that loss. If anything, Claude Code "knows" my code bases better. The rest, then, to me at least is moot.
Claude is substantially cheaper for me, per reviewed, fixed change committed. More importantly to me, it demands less of my limited time per reviewed, fixed change committed.
Having a junior dev working with me at this point wouldn't be worth it to me if it wasn't for the training aspect: We still need pipelines of people who will learn to use the AI models, and who will learn to do the things it can't do well.
But my point was: it's good that Claude has become a rightful legend in the realm of coding, but before and regardless, a candidate that told you "that class will have a .SolveAnyProblem() method: I want to believe" presents an handicap. As you said no assistant revealed to be perfect, but assistants who attempt mixing coding sessions and creative fiction writing raise alarms.
