How creditable would Claude be if it couldn’t answer “1+2=3?”

Worse, this is really human beings trying to pretend that their AI is AGI.

My point is what makes this terribly different than Alexa skills

For this category of problems, no, very unlike human beings.

Right.. plumbing in specific plugins for specific prompt forms feels like an expert system, rather than some general purpose intelligence.

Also big picture its hard to see it as some sort of self-improving intelligence if humans are hand crafting these paths and tools for it.

Exactly, an expert system marketed to nonexperts…