Preferably, it would ask for help to see the image and only engineer its own workaround if that was not an option. There could also very well be something in the prompt that would cause it not to do so. Opus 4.8 is usually good at asking for clarification for things like this when I'm using it.
As a dev with three decades experience writing code, I use it for stuff I know all about all the time. And these days, the majority of the time it is more correct than I would've been without a few iterations of trial and error.
