There are still significant limitations, no amount of prompting will get current models to approach abstraction and architecture the way a person does. But I'm finding that these Gemini models are finally able to replace searches and stackoverflow for a lot of my day-to-day programming.
They are the perfect "fake it till you make it" example cranked up to 11. They'll bullshit you, but will do it confidently and with proper grammar.
> Many attempts at making them refuse to answer what they don't know caused them to refuse to answer things they did in fact know.
I can see in some contexts that being desirable if it can be a parameter that can be tweaked. I guess it's not that easy, or we'd already have it.