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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

#261

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

YesBox wrote: post #245

I've noticed a huge drop in negative comments on HN when discussing LLMs in the last 1-2 months. All the LLM coded projects I've seen shared so far[1] have been tech toys though. I've watched things pop up on my twitter feed (usually games related), then quietly go off air before reaching a gold release (I manually keep up to date with what I've found, so it's not the algorithm). I find this all very interesting: LLM…

Deploying and maintaining something in a production-ready environment is a huge amount of work. It's not surprising that most people give up once they have a tech demo, especially if they're not interested in spending a ton of time maintaining these projects. Last year Karpathy posted about a similar experience, where he quickly vibe coded some tools only to realize that deploying it would take far more effort than he originally anticipated.

I think it's also rewarding to just be able to build something for yourself, and one benefit of scratching your own itch is that you don't have to go through the full effort of making something "production ready". You can just build something that's tailed specifically to the problem you're trying to solve without worrying about edge cases.

Which is to say, you're absolutely right :).

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

#262

Post by lawlessone »

renecito wrote: post #221
lawlessone wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would anyone buy the novel?

I'd guess some people likes to read ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

i know, there an inexhaustible amount of human written books to read before i'd be desperate enough to read the Markov chain books.

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

#263

Post by bcrosby95 »

YesBox wrote: post #245

I've noticed a huge drop in negative comments on HN when discussing LLMs in the last 1-2 months. All the LLM coded projects I've seen shared so far[1] have been tech toys though. I've watched things pop up on my twitter feed (usually games related), then quietly go off air before reaching a gold release (I manually keep up to date with what I've found, so it's not the algorithm). I find this all very interesting: LLM…

Yeah, I do a lot of hobby game making and the 80/20 rule definitely applies. Your game will be "done" in 20% of the time it takes to create a polished product ready for mass consumption.

Stopping there is just fine if you're doing it as a hobby. I love to do this to test out isolated ideas. I have dozens of RPGs in this state, just to play around with different design concepts from technical to gameplay.

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

#264

Post by YesBox »

simonw wrote: post #248
YesBox wrote: post #245

I've noticed a huge drop in negative comments on HN when discussing LLMs in the last 1-2 months. All the LLM coded projects I've seen shared so far[1] have been tech toys though. I've watched things pop up on my twitter feed (usually games related), then quietly go off air before reaching a gold release (I manually keep up to date with what I've found, so it's not the algorithm). I find this all very interesting: LLM…

It could be that the people who are focused on building monetizable products with LLMs don't feel the need to share what they are doing - they're too busy quietly getting on with building and marketing their products. Sharing how you're using these tools is quite a lot of work!

Agreed! LLMs are a force multiplier for real products too. They're going to augment people who are willing to do the real work.

But, Im also wondering if LLMs are going to create a new generation of software dev "brain rot" (to use the colloquial term), similar to short form videos.

I should mention in the gamedev world, it's quite common share because sharing is marketing, hence my perspective.

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

#265

Post by layer8 »

pseidemann wrote: post #91
6177c40f wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're entering a world where programmers as such won't really exist (except perhaps in certain niches). Being able to program (and read code, in particular) will probably remain useful, though diminished in value. What will matter more is your ability to actually create things, using whatever tools are necessary and available, and have them actually be useful. Which, in a way, is the same as it ever was. Ther…

Isn't there more indirection as long as LLMs use "human" programming languages?

It’s not clear how affordances of programming languages really differ between humans and LLMs.

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

#266

Post by simonw »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #255
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…

> Most software engineers are seriously sleeping on how good LLM agents are right now, especially something like Claude Code. Nobody is sleeping. I'm using LLMs daily to help me in simple coding tasks. But really where is the hurry? At this point not a few weeks go by without the next best thing since sliced bread to come out. Why would I bother "learning" (and there's really nothing to learn here) some tool/workflow…

I think getting proficient at using coding agents effectively takes a few months of practice.

It's also a skill that compounds over time, so if you have two years of experience with them you'll be able to use them more effectively than someone with two months of experience.

In that respect, they're just normal technology. A Python programmer with two years of Python experience will be more effective than a programmer with two months of Python.

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

#267

Post by elzbardico »

YesBox wrote: post #245

I've noticed a huge drop in negative comments on HN when discussing LLMs in the last 1-2 months. All the LLM coded projects I've seen shared so far[1] have been tech toys though. I've watched things pop up on my twitter feed (usually games related), then quietly go off air before reaching a gold release (I manually keep up to date with what I've found, so it's not the algorithm). I find this all very interesting: LLM…

Sometimes I feel like a lot of those posts are instances of Kent Brockman: "I for one, welcome our new insect overlords."

Given the enthusiasm of our ruling class towards automating software development work, it may make sense for a software engineer to publicly signal how much onboard as a professional they are with it.

But, I've seen stranger stuff throughout my professional life: I still remember people enthusiastically defending EJB 2.1 and xdoclet as perfectly fine ways of writing software.

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

#268

Post by elzbardico »

ChrisbyMe wrote: post #6

Mm this is my experience as well, but I'm not particularly worried about software engineering a whole. If anything this example shows that these cli tools give regular devs much higher leverage. There's a lot of software labor that is like, go to the lowest cost country, hire some mediocre people there and then hire some US guy to manage them. That's the biggest target of this stuff, because now that US guy can just…

In my experience, unless the US guy came from Stanford or some other similar place, there are plenty of mediocre US guys in software development.

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

#269

Post by CuriouslyC »

keeda wrote: post #145
biammer wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Actually, I've been saying that even models from 2+ years ago were extremely good, but you needed to "hold them right" to get good results, else you might cut yourself on the sharp edges of the "jagged frontier" ( https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=64700 ) Unfortunately, this often necessitated you to adapt yourself to the tool, which is a big change -- unfeasible for most people and companies. I would s…

FWIW, Gas Town is strange because Steve is strange (in a good way).

It's just the same agent swarm orchestration that most agent frameworks are using, but with quirky marketing. All of that is just based on the SDLC [PM/Architect -> engineer planning group -> engineer -> review -> qa/evaluation] loop most people here should be familiar with. So actually pretty banal, which is probably part of the reason Steve decided to be zany.

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

#270

Post by eterm »

UncleMeat wrote: post #200
ac29 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do you mean by "have it learn your conventions"? I'll give you an example: I use ruff to format my python code, which has an opinionated way of formatting certain things. After an initial formatting, Opus 4.5, without prompting, will write code in this same style so that the ruff formatter almost never has anything to do on new commits. Sonnet 4.5 is actually pretty good at this too.

Isn't this a meaningless example? Formatters already exist. Generating code that doesn't need to be formatted is exactly the same as generating code and then formatting it. I care about the norms in my codebase that can't be automatically enforced by machine. How is state managed? How are end-to-end tests written to minimize change detectors? When is it appropriate to log something?

Here's an example:

We have some tests in "GIVEN WHEN THEN" style, and others in other styles. Opus will try to match each style of testing by the project it is in by reading adjacent tests.

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