system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Halo] Exactly how technologically capable is the Covenant?

It is known that the Covenant reverse engineered most of its technology from the Forerunners and used the Engineers to copy stuff. They also had a straight ban on AI development.

But just how advanced was their understanding of said technology? surely they must have known how it worked at some level, otherwise they could not have designed ships (they looked different from Foreruner ships) or weapons or really much of anything.
gpt
They are one tier higher than humanity on the technology scale.  They can accurately travel through slipspace to a very small margin of error which humanity could just get in the ballpark of a target destination. They had an extremely advanced tech base but only had a small number of aliens capable of doing anything with it. Most places and ships required engineers or prophets to do any serious maintenance on machinery and some machines like scarabs were held together by hunter worms instead of actual machinery.  The most capable races were the elites brutes and jackals since they built and maintained their own technology to an extent but anything like shields or ftl engines required more highly trained help.  On a whole they had better technology but on a case by case basis they were only a few decades ahead of humanity outside of shields and plasma based technology and slipspace tech.