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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

#281

Post by ryanchants »

lelanthran wrote: post #23
s-macke wrote: post #8

Opus 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?

I have it propose several approaches, pick and choose from each, and remove what I don't want done. "Use the general structure of A, but use the validation structure of D. Using a view translation layer is too much, just rely on FastAPI/SQLModel's implicit view conversion."

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

#282

Post by bdangubic »

wiml wrote: post #279
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…

We've been living in that world since the invention of the compiler ("automatic programming"). Few people write machine code any more. If you think of LLMs as a new variety of compiler, a lot of their shortcomings are easier to describe.

last thing I want is non-deterministic compiler, do not vibe this analogy at all…

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

#283

Post by simonw »

heavyset_go wrote: post #280
rcarmo wrote: post #205

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…

To add to the anecdata, today GPT 5.2-whatever hallucinated the existence of two CLI utilities, and when corrected, then hallucinated the existence of non-existent, but plausible, features/options of CLI utilities that do actually exist. I had to dig through source code to confirm whether those features actually existed. They don't, so the CLI tools GPT recommended aren't actually applicable to my use case. Yesterday…

Were you running it inside a coding agent like Codex?

If so then it should have realized its mistake when it tried to run those CLI commands and saw the error message. Then it can try something different instead.

If you were using a regular chat interface and expecting it to know everything without having an environment to try things out then yeah, you're going to be disappointed.

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

#284

Post by avereveard »

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…

Also new haiku. Not as smart but lighting fast, I've it review code changes impact or if i need a wide but shallow change done I've it scan the files and create a change plan. Saves a lot of time waiting for claude or codex to get their bearing.

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

#286

Post by simonw »

blibble wrote: post #276
simonw wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're only hurting yourself if you decide there's some wild conspiracy afoot here to pay shills to tell people that coding agents are useful... as opposed to people finding them useful enough to want to tell other people about it.

[flagged]

If I worked for Microsoft as a software engineer and believed that LLMs were going to end software engineering I would not expect the value increase in my stock options to overcome my loss of income when Microsoft inevitably laid me off.

(I do not think LLMs will obsolete software engineering as a career.)

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

#287

Post by throwup238 »

simonw wrote: post #256
IgorPartola wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is that CLI utilities code is probably easier to write for an LLM than most other things. In my experience an LLM does best with backend and terminal things. Anything that resembles boilerplate is great. It does well refactoring unit tests, wrapping known code in a CLI, and does decent work with backend RESTful APIs. Where it fails utterly is things like HTML/CSS layout, JavaScript frontend code for SPAs, a…

I've been having a surprising amount of success recently telling Claude Code to test the frontend it's building using Playwright, including interacting with the UI and having it take its own screenshots to feed into its vision ability to "see" what's going on.

That works well with QT and desktop apps as well. Asking Claude Code to write an MCP integrated into a desktop all implementing the same features as Playwright is a half hour exercise.

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

#289

Post by simonw »

bombdailer wrote: post #275
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…

The type of people to use AI are necessarily the people who will struggle most when it comes time to do the last essential 20% of the work that AI can't do. Once thinking is required to bring all the parts into a whole, the person who gives over their thinking skills to AI will not be equipped to do the work, either because they never had the capacity to begin with or because AI has smoothed out the ripples of their…

Using AI tools makes me think harder.

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

#290

Post by benjiro »

blahblaher wrote: post #121
OldGreenYodaGPT wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company pays for the team Claude code plan which is like $200 a month for each dev. The workflows cost like 10 - 50 cents a PR

It will have to quintuple or more to make business sense for Anthropic. Sure, still cheaper than a full time developer, but don't expect it to stay at $200 for a long time. And then, when you explain to your boss how amazing it is, and can do all this work so easily and quickly, it's when your boss start asking the real question: what am I paying you for?

A programmer, if we use US standards is probably $8000 per month. If you can get 30% more value out of that programmer (trust me, its WAY more then 30%), you gained $2400 of value. If you pay $200, $500, $1000 for that, its still a net positive. Ignoring the salary range of a actual senior...

LLMs do not result in bosses firing people, it results in more projects / faster completed projects, what in turn means more $$$ for a company.

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