The code that the best frontier models produce is definitely good if you prompt it with what you believe "good" means, with the caveat that code quality depends heavily on the language -- Python, Typescript/Javascript, Java and C are quite good, Rust, C++ and Go tend to be decent to weak depending on the specific model, and other languages are poor.
The C output is absolutely terrible. I cannot fathom an experienced C coder who has found otherwise for anything non trivial. The code is full of things like return from stack, poor buffer size discipline, etc.
Yeah, I've had mixed results with Rust. Oddly it's been most helpful for me so far in getting Rust code running in WASM without having to know anything about WASM, which I have found delightful.
