I said people are saying the models are PhD level intelligent not that you need to be. I get a ton of value from them and I don't have a PhD.
Well, that's the point. As long as they are using a recent-ish model it really doesn't matter. Not that there are no differences in performances between models, it's that there is no model today that even comes close not requiring extensive hand-holding to accomplish real-world software engineering of even slightly moderate complexity.
Case in point: I have been frustrated that most markdown viewers don't do automatic indentation of section levels. I thought, this is a perfect test of coding assistants: the problem and solution is straightforward conceptually, and I don't even care about the platform and architecture used to accomplish it.
I've asked all the major models to implement a simple markdown viewer that could do automatic indentation, and they all fall flat. Some even give me code that will not run; of the rest, none has provided code that basically does the thing I've asked for.