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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

#201

Post by jack_pp »

blahblaher wrote: post #118
6177c40f wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheaper than hiring another developer, probably. My experience: for a few dollars I was able to extensively refactor a Python codebase in half a day. This otherwise would have taken multiple days of very tedious work.

And that's what the C-suite wants to know. Prepare yourself to be replaced in the not so distant future. Hope you have a good "nest" to support yourself when you're inevitably fired.

Well probably OP won't be affected because management is very pleased with him and his output, why would they fire him? Hire someone who can probably have better output than him for 10% more money or someone who might have the same output for 25% less pay?

You think any manager in their right mind would take risks like that?

I think the real consequences are that they probably are so pleased with how productive the team is becoming that they will not hire new people or fire the ones who aren't keeping up with the times.

It's like saying "wow, our factory just produced 50% more cars this year, time to shut down half the factory to reduce costs!"

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

#202

Post by GoatInGrey »

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.

There are several rubs with that operating protocol extending beyond the "you're holding it wrong" claim.

1) There exists a threshold, only identifiable in retrospect, past which it would have been faster to locate or write the code yourself than to navigate the LLM's correction loop or otherwise ensure one-shot success.

2) The intuition and motivations of LLMs derive from a latent space that the LLM cannot actually access. I cannot get a reliable answer on why the LLM chose the approaches it did; it can only retroactively confabulate. Unlike human developers who can recall off-hand, or at least review associated tickets and meeting notes to jog their memory. The LLM prompter always documenting sufficiently to bridge this LLM provenance gap hits rub #1.

3) Gradually building prompt dependency where one's ability to take over from the LLM declines and one can no longer answer questions or develop at the same velocity themselves.

4) My development costs increasingly being determined by the AI labs and hardware vendors they partner with. Particularly when the former will need to increase prices dramatically over the coming years to break even with even 2025 economics.

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

#203

Post by sonnig »

Loeffelmann wrote: post #124
OldGreenYodaGPT wrote: post #33

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…

Why do all these AI generated readmes have a directory structure sections it's so redundant because you know I could just run tree

It makes me so exhausted trying to read them... my brain can tell immediately when there's so much redundant information that it just starts shutting itself off.

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

#204

Post by NewsaHackO »

Papazsazsa wrote: post #123
NewsaHackO wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>establish benchmarks that make sense and are reliable How aren't current LLM coding benchmarks reliable?

They're manipulated.

Unless you are going to be more specific, that criticism applies to all benchmarks that are connected to a positive gain, not just AI coding benchmarks.

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

#205

Post by rcarmo »

I had a similar set of experiences with GPT 5.x over the holiday break, across somewhat more disparate domains: https://taoofmac.com/space/notes/2025/12/31/1830

I hacked together a Swift tool to replace a Python automation I had, merged an ARM JIT engine into a 68k emulator, and even got a very decent start on a synth project I’ve been meaning to do for years.

What has become immensely apparent to me is that even gpt-5-mini can create decent Go CLI apps provided you write down a coherent spec and review the code as if it was a peer’s pull request (the VS Code base prompts and tooling steer even dumb models through a pretty decent workflow).

GPT 5.2 and the codex variants are, to me, every bit as good as Opus but without the groveling and emojis - I can ask it to build an entire CI workflow and it does it in pretty much one shot if I give it the steps I want.

So for me at least this model generation is a huge force multiplier (but I’ve always been the type to plan before coding and reason out most of the details before I start, so it might be a matter of method).

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

#206

Post by vbezhenar »

honeycrispy wrote: post #26

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.

I'm using AI tools to find issues in my code. 9/10 of their suggestions are utter nonsense and fixing them would make my code worse. That said, there are real issues they're finding, so it's worth it.

I wouldn't be surprised to find out that they will find issues infinitely, if looped with fixes.

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

#207

Post by drchiu »

Having used Opus 4.5 for the past 5 weeks, I estimate it codes better than 95% of the people I've ever worked with.

And it writes with more clarity too.

The only people who are complaining about "AI slop" are those whose jobs depend on AI to go away (which it won't).

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

#208

Post by troupo »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #54
OldGreenYodaGPT wrote: post #33

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…

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…

> Opus 4.5 really is at a new tier however. It just...works.

Literally tried it yesterday. I didn't see a single difference with whatever model Claude Code was using two months ago. Same crippled context window. Same "I'll read 10 irrelevant lines from a file", same random changes etc.

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

#209

Post by troupo »

speedgoose wrote: post #189
theanonymousone wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s mostly the model, Copilot, Claude Code, OpenCode, snake oil like Oh My OpenCode, it’s not huge differences.

Claude Code seems to package a relatively smart prompt as well, as it seems to work better even with one-line prompts than alternatives that just invoke the API.

Key word: seems. It's impossible to do a proper qualitative analysis.

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

#210

Post by ncruces »

structural wrote: post #71
tannedNerd wrote: post #4

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…

How will those juniors ever grow up to be seniors now?
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