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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

#161

Post by spaceman_2020 »

biammer wrote: post #127
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #54

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…

[flagged]

It's a little weird how defensive people are about these tools. Did everyone really think being able to import a few npm packages, string together a few APIs, and run npx create-react-app was something a large number of people could do forever?

The vast majority of coders in employment barely write anything more complex than basic CRUD apps. These jobs were always going to be automated or abstracted away sooner or later.

Every profession changes. Saying that these new tools are useless or won't impact you/xyz devs is just ignoring a repeated historical pattern

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

#162

Post by giancarlostoro »

vl wrote: post #160

Honestly, I don’t understand universal praise for Opus 4.5. It’s good, but really not better than other agents. Just today: Opus 4.5 Extended Thinking designed psql schema for “stream updates after snapshot” with bugs. Grok Heavy gave correct solution without explanations. ChatGPT 5.2 Pro gave correct solution and also explained why simpler way wouldn’t work.

Are you using Claude Code? Because that might be the secret cause you're missing. With Claude Code I can instruct it to validate things after its done with code, and usually it finds that it goofed. I can also tell it to work on like five different things, and go "hey spin up some agents to work on this" and it will spawn 5 agents in parallel to work on said things.

I've basically ditched Groke et al and I refuse to give Sam Altman a penny.

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

#163

Post by solumunus »

AstroBen wrote: post #95
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #54

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…

my issue hasn't been for a long time now that the code they write works or doesn't work. My issues all stem from that it works, but does the wrong thing

Correct it then, and next time craft a more explicit plan.

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

#164

Post by zmmmmm »

AstroBen wrote: post #95
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #54

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…

my issue hasn't been for a long time now that the code they write works or doesn't work. My issues all stem from that it works, but does the wrong thing

> My issues all stem from that it works, but does the wrong thing

It's an opportunity, not a problem. Because it means there's a gap in your specifications and then your tests.

I use Aider not Claude but I run it with Anthropic models. And what I found is that comprehensively writing up the documentation for a feature spec style before starting eliminates a huge amount of what you're referring to. It serves a triple purpose (a) you get the documentation, (b) you guide the AI and (c) it's surprising how often this helps to refine the feature itself. Sometimes I invoke the AI to help me write the spec as well, asking it to prompt for areas where clarification is needed etc.

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

#165

Post by burntsushi »

simonw wrote: post #153

Opus 4.5 really is something else. I've been having a ton of fun throwing absurdly difficult problems at it recently and it keeps on surprising me. A JavaScript interpreter written in Python? How about a WebAssembly runtime in Python? How about porting BurntSushi's absurdly great Rust optimized string search routines to C and making them faster ? And these are mostly just casual experiments, often run from my phone!

> How about porting BurntSushi's absurdly great Rust optimized string search routines to C and making them faster?

How did it do? :-)

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

#166

Post by cadamsdotcom »

simonw wrote: post #154
AstroBen wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my issue hasn't been for a long time now that the code they write works or doesn't work. My issues all stem from that it works, but does the wrong thing

If it does the wrong thing you tell it what the right thing is and have it try again. With the latest models if you're clear enough with your requirements you'll usually find it does the right thing on the first try.

Even better, have it write code to describe the right thing then run its code against that, taking yourself out of that loop.

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

#167

Post by svieira »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #64
petcat wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has always been my problem whether it's Gemini, openai or Claude. Unless you hand-hold it to an extreme degree, it is going to build a mountain next to a molehill. It may end up working, but the thing is going to convolute apis and abstractions and mix patterns basically everywhere

It's very good at following instructions. You can build dedicated agents for different tasks (backend, API design, database design) and make it follow design and coding patterns. It's verbose by default but a few hours of custom instructions and you can make it code just like anyone

> just like anyone

Arthur Whitney?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Whitney_(computer_scien...

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

#168

Post by spaceman_2020 »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #135
biammer wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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 a…

I used claude code to set up a bunch of basic tools my wife was using in her daily work. Things like custom pomodoro timers, task managers, todo notes.

She used to log into 3 different websites. Now she just opens localhost:3000 and has all of them on the same page. No emails shared with anyone. All data stored locally.

I could have done this earlier but the time commitment with Claude Code now was writing a spec in 5-minutes and pressing approve a few times vs half a day.

I count this as an absolute win. No privacy breaches, no data sharing.

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

#169

Post by biammer »

Aurornis wrote: post #148
biammer wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> If I am unable to convince you to stop meticulously training the tools of the oppressor (for a fee!) then I just ask you do so quietly. I'm kind of fascinated by how AI has become such a culture war topic with hyperbole like "tools of the oppressor" It's equally fascinating how little these comments understand about how LLMs work. Using an LLM for inference (what you do when you use Claude Code) does not train the…

I understand how these LLMs work.

I find it hard to believe there are people who know these companies stole the entire creative output of humanity and egregiously continually scrape the internet are, for some reason, ignoring the data you voluntarily give them.

> I know that breaks the "training the tools of the oppressor" narrative

"Narrative"? This is just reality. In their own words:

> The awards to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI – each with a $200M ceiling – will enable the Department to leverage the technology and talent of U.S. frontier AI companies to develop agentic AI workflows across a variety of mission areas. Establishing these partnerships will broaden DoD use of and experience in frontier AI capabilities and increase the ability of these companies to understand and address critical national security needs with the most advanced AI capabilities U.S. industry has to offer. The adoption of AI is transforming the Department’s ability to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries [0]

Is 'warfighting adversaries' some convoluted code for allowing Aurornis to 'see a 1337x in productivity'?

Or perhaps you are a wealthy westerner of a racial and sexual majority and as such have felt little by way of oppression by this tech?

In such a case I would encourage you to develop empathy, or at least sympathy.

> Using an LLM for inference .. does not train the LLM.

In their own words:

> One of the most useful and promising features of AI models is that they can improve over time. We continuously improve our models through research breakthroughs as well as exposure to real-world problems and data. When you share your content with us, it helps our models become more accurate and better at solving your specific problems and it also helps improve their general capabilities and safety. We do not use your content to market our services or create advertising profiles of you—we use it to make our models more helpful. ChatGPT, for instance, improves by further training on the conversations people have with it, unless you opt out.

[0] https://www.ai.mil/latest/news-press/pr-view/article/4242822...

[1] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/5722486-how-your-data-is...

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

#170

Post by zmmmmm »

jghn wrote: post #107
fragmede wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By "the website" do you mean you're copy pasting, or are you using the code system where Anthropic clones your code from GitHub and interacts with it in a VM/container for you.

Just pasting code snippets, and occasionally an entire file or two into the main claude.com site. I usually already know what I want and need, but just want to speed up the process on how to get there, and perhaps I missed something in the process.

Aider is pretty good way to automate that. You can use it with Claude models. It lets you be completely precise down to a single file, and sit in chat/code/review loop - but it does a lot of the chores, like generating commit messages etc while saving you the copy paste effort.
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