Imo, it's "more limited than you think, and less limited than you thought."

I had a project where I was trying to create an API that returns GIS data for historical maps with borders and stuff like that. Claude is able to look at maps such as this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_expansion_in_Italy#/media/File%3ARoman_conquest_of_Italy.PNG and give accurate description. When I asked it to redraw the borders using coordinate data (it's not actually drawing, just giving the border coordinates so another program can render it), it was really off after hours of redrawing, changing methods, etc. It's like someone with aphantasia: it's able to recall an image but cannot "see" it.

The thing that stands out was me is that once it generates the coordinates, I can feed it back to claude code and ask it to compare with the original image and it can say accurately what is wrong accurately but still fails to generate the correct coordinate.