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Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far

burkeholland.github.io

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Re: Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far

#132

Most software engineers are seriously sleeping on how good LLM agents are right now, especially something like Claude Code. Once you’ve got Claude Code set up, you can point it at your codebase, have it learn your conventions, pull in best practices, and refine everything until it’s basically operating like a super-powered teammate. The real unlock is building a solid set of reusable “skills” plus a few agents for th…

Is Claude "Code" anything special,or it's mostly the LLM and other CLIs (e.g. Copilot) also work?

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Re: Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far

#133
Opus 4.5 ate through my Copilot quota last month, and it's already halfway through it for this month. I've used it a lot, for really complex code.

And my conclusion is: it's still not as smart as a good human programmer. It frequently got stuck, went down wrong paths, ignored what I told it to do to do something wrong, or even repeat a previous mistake I had to correct.

Yet in other ways, it's unbelievably good. I can give it a directory full of code to analyze, and it can tell me it's an implementation of Kozo Sugiyama's dagre graph layout algorithm, and immediately identify the file with the error. That's unbelievably impressive. Unfortunately it can't fix the error. The error was one of the many errors it made during previous sessions.

So my verdict is that it's great for code analysis, and it's fantastic for injecting some book knowledge on complex topics into your programming, but it can't tackle those complex problems by itself.

Yesterday and today I was upgrading a bunch of unit tests because of a dependency upgrade, and while it was occasionally very helpful, it also regularly got stuck. I got a lot more done than usual in the same time, but I do wonder if it wasn't too much. Wasn't there an easier way to do this? I didn't look for it, because every step of the way, Opus's solution seemed obvious and easy, and I had no idea how deep a pit it was getting me into. I should have been more critical of the direction it was pointing to.

Re: Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far

#134

A couple weeks ago I had Opus 4.5 go over my project and improve anything it could find. It "worked" but the architecture decisions it made were baffling, and had many, many bugs. I had to rewrite half of the code. I'm not an AI hater, I love AI for tests, finding bugs, and small chores. Opus is great for specific, targeted tasks. But don't ask it to do any general architecture, because you'll be soon to regret it.

these models work best when you know what you want to achieve and it helps you get there while you guide it. "Improve anything you can find" sounds like you didn't really know

As a tool to help developers I think it's really useful. It's great at stuff people are bad at, and bad at stuff people are good at. Use it as a tool, not a replacement.

Re: Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really think a lof of people tried AI coding earlier, got frustrated at the errors and gave up. That's where the rejection of all these doomer predictions comes from. And I get it. Coding with Claude Code really was prompting something, getting errors, and asking it to fix it. Which was still useful but I could see why a skilled coder adding a feature to a complex codebase would just give up Opus 4.5 really is at a…

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Democratizing coding so regular people can get the most out of computers is the opposite of oppression. You are mistaking your interests for societies interests.

It's the same with artists who are now pissed that regular people can manifest their artistic ideas without needing to go through an artist or spend years studying the craft. The artists are calling the AI companies oppressors because they are breaking the artist's stranglehold on the market.

It's incredibly ironic how socializing what was a privatized ability has otherwise "socialist" people completely losing their shit. Just the mask of pure virtue slipping...

Re: Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far

#137

The problem with this is none of this is production quality. You haven’t done edge case testing for user mistakes, a security audit, or even just maintainability. Yes opus 4.5 seems great but most of the time it tries to vastly over complicate a solution. Its answer will be 10x harder to maintain and debug than the simpler solution a human would have created by thinking about the constraints of keeping code working.

Yes, but my junior coworkers also don't reliably do edge case testing for user errors either unless specifically tasked to do so, likely with a checklist of specific kinds of user errors they need to check for. And it turns out the quality of output you get from both the humans and the models is highly correlated with the quality of the specification you write before you start coding. Letting a model run amok within…

The best specification is code. English is a very poor approximation.

I can’t get past that by the time I write up an adequate spec and review the agents code, I probably could have done it myself by hand. It’s not like typing was even remotely close to the slow part.

AI, agents, etc are insanely useful for enhancing my knowledge and getting me there faster.

Re: Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far

#138

Most software engineers are seriously sleeping on how good LLM agents are right now, especially something like Claude Code. Once you’ve got Claude Code set up, you can point it at your codebase, have it learn your conventions, pull in best practices, and refine everything until it’s basically operating like a super-powered teammate. The real unlock is building a solid set of reusable “skills” plus a few agents for th…

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Re: Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really think a lof of people tried AI coding earlier, got frustrated at the errors and gave up. That's where the rejection of all these doomer predictions comes from. And I get it. Coding with Claude Code really was prompting something, getting errors, and asking it to fix it. Which was still useful but I could see why a skilled coder adding a feature to a complex codebase would just give up Opus 4.5 really is at a…

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Each failed prediction should lower our confidence in the next "it's finally useful!" claim. But this inductive reasoning breaks down at genuine inflection points.

I agree with your framing that measuring should NOT be separated from political issues, but each can be made clear separately (framing it as "training the tools of the oppressor" seems to conflate measuring tool usefulness with politics).

Re: Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far

#140

The problem with this is none of this is production quality. You haven’t done edge case testing for user mistakes, a security audit, or even just maintainability. Yes opus 4.5 seems great but most of the time it tries to vastly over complicate a solution. Its answer will be 10x harder to maintain and debug than the simpler solution a human would have created by thinking about the constraints of keeping code working.

Isn't it though? I've worked with plenty of devs who shipped much lower quality code into production than I see Claude 4.5 or GPT 5.2 write. I find that SOTA models are more likely to: write tests, leave helpful comments, name variables in meaningful ways, check if the build succeeds, etc.

Stuff that seems basic, but that I haven't always been able to count on in my teams' "production" code.

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