but demanding to be behind the wheel and understand all the code will affect velocity compared to other teams that are utilizing AI to the max
People should have read to the end of "Building a C compiler with a team of parallel Claudes"[1]:
The resulting compiler has nearly reached the limits of Opus [4.6]’s abilities. I tried (hard!) to fix several of the above limitations but wasn’t fully successful. New features and bugfixes frequently broke existing functionality.
"tried (hard!)" is very ominous. I wonder how Mythos would fare. Presumably it would get further, maybe much further. But I strongly doubt the "frequently broke existing functionality" problem was solved. Eventually humans have to understand the most difficult parts of the code. Good luck with that![1] https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler