I agree, it wrote an entire NES emulator for me. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46443767
It cloned one of the many open source ones available is what you mean.
Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far
21–30 of 1001 posts
Re: Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far
#22I really wonder what means for software moving forward. In the last few months I've used Claude Code to build personalized versions of Superwhisper (voice-to-text), CleanShot X (screenshot and image markup), and TextSniper (image to text). The only cost was some time and my $20/month subscription.
> I really wonder what means for software moving forward.
It means that it is going to be as easy to create software as it is to create a post on TikTok, and making your software commercially successful will be basically the same task (with the same uncontrollable dynamics) as whether or not your TikTok post goes viral.
Re: Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far
#23Opus 4.5 has become really capable. Not in terms of knowledge. That was already phenomenal. But in its ability to act independently: to make decisions, collaborate with me to solve problems, ask follow-up questions, write plans and actually execute them. You have to experience it yourself on your own real problems and over the course of days or weeks. Every coding problem I was able to define clearly enough within th…
> You have to experience it yourself on your own real problems and over the course of days or weeks.
How do you stop it from over-engineering everything?
Re: Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far
#24Oh another run of new small apps. Why not unleash this oh so powerful tools not on a jira ticket written two years ago, targeting 3 different repos in an old legacy moloch, like actual work?
It's always just the "Fibonacci" equivalent
Re: Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far
#25The 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.
That may be true now, but think about how far we've come in a year alone! This is really impressive, and even if the models don't improve, someone will build skills to attack these specific scenarios. Over time, I imagine even cloud providers, app stores etc can start doing automated security scanning for these types of failure modes, or give a more restricted version of the experience to ensure safety too.
There's a fallacy in here that is often repeated. We've made it from 0 to 5, so we'll be at 10 any day now! But in reality there are any number of roadblocks that might mean progress halts at 7 for years, if not forever.
Re: Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far
#26A 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.
Re: Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far
#27The 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.
> Its answer will be 10x harder to maintain and debug
Maintain and debug by who? It's just going to be Opus 4.5 (and 4.6...and 5...etc.) that are maintaining and debugging it. And I don't think it minds, and I also think it will be quite good at it.
Re: Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far
#28Opus 4.5 has become really capable. Not in terms of knowledge. That was already phenomenal. But in its ability to act independently: to make decisions, collaborate with me to solve problems, ask follow-up questions, write plans and actually execute them. You have to experience it yourself on your own real problems and over the course of days or weeks. Every coding problem I was able to define clearly enough within th…
> You have to experience it yourself on your own real problems and over the course of days or weeks. How do you stop it from over-engineering everything?
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
Re: Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far
#29The 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.
That may be true now, but think about how far we've come in a year alone! This is really impressive, and even if the models don't improve, someone will build skills to attack these specific scenarios. Over time, I imagine even cloud providers, app stores etc can start doing automated security scanning for these types of failure modes, or give a more restricted version of the experience to ensure safety too.
This comment addresses none of the concerns raised. It writes off entire fields of research (accessibility, UX, application security) as Just train the models more bro. Accelerate.
Re: Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far
#30The 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.
I can generally get maintainable results simply by telling Claude "Please keep the code as simple as possible. I plan on extending this later so readability is critical."