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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

#331

Post by myk9001 »

ryandrake wrote: post #198
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…

This was me. I was a huge AI coding detractor on here for a while (you can check my comment history). But, in order to stay informed and not just be that grouchy curmudgeon all the time, I kept up with the models and regularly tried them out. Opus 4.5 is so much better than anything I've tried before, I'm ready to change my mind about AI assistance. I even gave -True Vibe Coding- a whirl. Yesterday, from a blank dire…

Oh, wow, that's impressive, thanks for sharing!

Going to one-up you though -- here's a literal one-liner that gets me a polished media center with beautiful interface and powerful skinning engine. It supports Android, BSD, Linux, macOS, iOS, tvOS and Windows.

`git clone https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc.git`

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

#332

Post by lacunary »

multisport wrote: post #324
whatever1 wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their thesis is that code quality does not matter as it is now a cheap commodity. As long as it passes the tests today it's great. If we need to refactor the whole goddamn app tomorrow, no problem, we will just pay up the credits and do it in a few hours.

Yes agreed, and tbh even if that thesis is wrong, what does it matter?

in my experience, what happens is the code base starts to collapse under its own weight. it becomes impossible to fix one thing without breaking another. the coding agent fails to recognize the global scope of the problem and tries local fixes over and over. progress gets slower, new features cost more. all the same problems faced by an inexperienced developer on a greenfield project!

has your experience been otherwise?

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

#333

Post by FloorEgg »

multisport wrote: post #320

What bothers me about posts like this is: mid-level engineers are not tasked with atomic, greenfield projects. If all an engineer did all day was build apps from scratch, with no expectation that others may come along and extend, build on top of, or depend on, then sure, Opus 4.5 could replace them. The hard thing about engineering is not "building a thing that works", its building it the right way, in an easily unde…

There are two types of right/wrong ways to build: the context specific right/wrong way to build something and an overly generalized engineer specific right/wrong way to build things.

I've worked on teams where multiple engineers argued about the "right" way to build something. I remember thinking that they had biases based on past experiences and assumptions about what mattered. It usually took an outsider to proactively remind them what actually mattered to the business case.

I remember cases where a team of engineers built something the "right" way but it turned out to be the wrong thing. (Well engineered thing no one ever used)

Sometimes hacking something together messily to confirm it's the right thing to be building is the right way. Then making sure it's secure, then finally paying down some technical debt to make it more maintainable and extensible.

Where I see real silly problems is when engineers over-engineer from the start before it's clear they are building the right thing, or when management never lets them clean up the code base to make it maintainable or extensible when it's clear it is the right thing.

There's always a balance/tension, but it's when things go too far one way or another that I see avoidable failures.

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

#334

Post by scubbo »

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…

This was me. I have done a full 180 over the last 12 months or so, from "they're an interesting idea, and technically impressive, but not practically useful" to "holy shit I can have entire days/weeks where I don't write a single line of code".

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

#335

Post by fragmede »

mattfrommars wrote: post #301

I’ve been saying this a countless time, LLM are great to build toy and experimental projects. I’m not shaming but I personally need to know if my sentiment is correct or not or I just don’t know how to use LLMs Can vibe coder gurus create operating system from scratch that competes with Linux and make it generate code that basically isn’t Linux since LLM are trained on said the source code … Also all this on $20 plan…

Consider your own emotions and the bias you have against it. If it is actually able to do the things it is hyped up to be, what does that mean for you, your job, and your career? Can you really extract those emotions from how you're approaching the situation? That tiniest bit of fear in your gut might be coloring your approach here. You want a new operating system not based on Linux, that competes with it, because if it is based on Linux, it's in the training data, which means it's cheating?

Jrifjxgwyenf! A hammer is a really bad screwdriver. My car is really bad at refrigerating food. If you ask for something outside its training data, it doesn't do a very good job. So don't do that! All of the code on the Internet is a pretty big dataset though, so maybe Claude could do an operating system that isn't Linux that competes with it by laundering the FreeBSD kernel source through the training process.

And you're barely even willing to invest any money into this? The first Apple computer cost $4,000 or so. You want the bleeding edge of technology delivered to the smartphone in your hand, for $20, or else it's a complete failure? Buddy, your sentiment isn't the issue, it's your attitude.

I'm not here spouting ridiculous claims like AI is going to cure all of the different kinds of cancer by the end of 2027, I just want to say that endlessly contrarian naysayers are as equally borish as the syncophantic hype AIs they're opposing.

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

#336

Post by fenwick67 »

multisport wrote: post #320

What bothers me about posts like this is: mid-level engineers are not tasked with atomic, greenfield projects. If all an engineer did all day was build apps from scratch, with no expectation that others may come along and extend, build on top of, or depend on, then sure, Opus 4.5 could replace them. The hard thing about engineering is not "building a thing that works", its building it the right way, in an easily unde…

Another thing that gets me with projects like this, there are already many examples of image converters, minesweeper clones etc that you can just fork on GitHub, the value of the LLM here is largely just stripping the copyright off

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

#338

Post by esperent »

mcv wrote: post #316
HawtAds wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copilot and many coding agents truncates the context window and uses dynamic summarization to keep costs low for them. That's how they are able to provide flat fee plans. You can see some of the context limits here: https://models.dev/ If you want the full capability, use the API and use something like opencode. You will find that a single PR can easily rack up 3 digits of consumption costs.

Maybe not, then. I'm afraid I have no idea what those numbers mean, but it looks like Gemini and ChatGPT 4 can handle a much larger context than Opus, and Opus 4.5 is cheaper than older versions. Is that correct? Because I could be misinterpreting that table.

I don't know about GPT4 but the latest one (GPT 5.2) has 200k context window while Gemini has 1m, five times higher. You'll be wanting to stay within the first 100k on all of them to avoid hitting quotas very quickly though (either start a new task or compact when you reach that) so in practice there's no difference.

I've been cycling between a couple of $20 accounts to avoid running out of quota and the latest of all of them are great. I'd give GPT 5.2 codex the slight edge but not by a lot.

The latest Claude is about the same too but the limits on the $20 plan are too low for me to bother with.

The last week has made me realize how close these are to being commodities already. Even the CLI the agents are nearly the same bar some minor quirks (although I've hit more bugs in Gemini CLI but each time I can just save a checkpoint and restart).

The real differentiating factor right now is quota and cost.

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

#339

Post by theshrike79 »

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…

> "asking it to fix it."

This is what people are still doing wrong. Tools in a loop people, tools in a loop.

The agent has to have the tools to detect whatever it just created is producing errors during linting/testing/running. When it can do that, I can loop again, fix the error and again - use the tools to see whether it worked.

I _still_ encounter people who think "AI programming" is pasting stuff into ChatGPT on the browser and they complain it hallucinates functions and produces invalid code.

Well, d'oh.

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

#340

Post by ryandrake »

myk9001 wrote: post #331
ryandrake wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was me. I was a huge AI coding detractor on here for a while (you can check my comment history). But, in order to stay informed and not just be that grouchy curmudgeon all the time, I kept up with the models and regularly tried them out. Opus 4.5 is so much better than anything I've tried before, I'm ready to change my mind about AI assistance. I even gave -True Vibe Coding- a whirl. Yesterday, from a blank dire…

Oh, wow, that's impressive, thanks for sharing! Going to one-up you though -- here's a literal one-liner that gets me a polished media center with beautiful interface and powerful skinning engine. It supports Android, BSD, Linux, macOS, iOS, tvOS and Windows. `git clone https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc.git `

Hah! I actually initiated the project because I'm a long time XBMC/Kodi user. I started using it when it was called XBMC, on an actual Xbox 1. I am sick and tired of its crashing, poor playback performance, and increasingly bloated feature set. It's embarrassing when I have friends or family over for movie night, and I have to explain "Sorry folks, Kodi froze midway through the movie again" while I frantically try to re-launch/reboot my way back to watching the movie. VLC's playback engine is much better but the VLC app's TV UX is ass. This application actually uses the libVLC playback engine under the hood.
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