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

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

#361

Post by soulofmischief »

flanked-evergl wrote: post #273
soulofmischief wrote: post #179

Opus 4.5 is currently helping me write a novel, comprehensive and highly performant programming language with all of the things I've ever wanted, done in exactly my opinionated way. This project would have taken me years of specialization and research to do right. Opus's strength has been the ability to both speak broadly and also drill down into low-level implementations. I can express an intent, and have some discu…

Helping you do something that nobody should be doing is not really compelling.

Did you have a specific criticism?

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

#362

Post by ewoodrich »

lacunary wrote: post #332
multisport wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 otherwi…

Right, I am a daily user of agentic LLM tools and have this exact problem in one large project that has complex business logic externally dictated by real world requirements out of my control, and let's say, variable quality of legacy code.

I remember when Gemini Pro 3 was the latest hotness and I started to get FOMO seeing demos on X posted to HN showing it one shot-ing all sorts of impressive stuff. So I tried it out for a couple days in Gemini CLI/OpenCode and ran into the exact same pain points I was dealing with using CC/Codex.

Flashy one shot demos of greenfield prompts are a natural hype magnet so get lots of attention, but in my experience aren't particularly useful for evaluating value in complex, legacy projects with tightly bounded requirements that can't be easily reduced to a page or two of prose for a prompt.

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

#363

Post by sksishbs »

whatever1 wrote: post #323
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…

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.

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

#365

Post by andrekandre »

whatever1 wrote: post #329
multisport wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The whole point of good engineering was not about just hitting the hard specs, but also have extendable, readable, maintainable code. But if today it’s so cheap to generate new code that meets updated specs, why care about the quality of the code itself? Maybe the engineering work today is to review specs and tests and let LLMs do whatever behind the scenes to hit the specs. If the specs change, just start from scrat…

  > let LLMs do whatever behind the scenes to hit the specs
assuming for the sake of argument that's completely true, then what happens to "competitive advantage" in this scenario?

it gets me thinking: if anyone can vibe from spec, whats stopping company a (or even user a) from telling an llm agent "duplicate every aspect of this service in python and deploy it to my aws account xyz"...

in that scenario, why even have companies?

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

#366

Post by soulofmischief »

jolt42 wrote: post #293
soulofmischief wrote: post #179

Opus 4.5 is currently helping me write a novel, comprehensive and highly performant programming language with all of the things I've ever wanted, done in exactly my opinionated way. This project would have taken me years of specialization and research to do right. Opus's strength has been the ability to both speak broadly and also drill down into low-level implementations. I can express an intent, and have some discu…

Long-term maybe we won't care about code because AI will just maintain it itself. Before that day comes, don't you want a coding language that isn't opinionated, but rather able to describe the problem at hand in the most understandable way possible (to a human)?

You're reading too much into what I mean by "opinionated".

I have very specific requirements and constraints that come from knowledge and experience, having worked with dozens of languages. The language in question is general-purpose, highly flexible and strict but not opinionated.

However, I am not experienced in every single platform and backend which I support, and the constraints of the language create some very interesting challenges. Coding agents make this achievable in a reasonable time frame. I am enjoying making the language, and I want to get experience with making low-level languages. What is the problem? Do you ever program for fun?

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

#367

Post by sksishbs »

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…

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

#368

Post by spacechild1 »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #135
biammer wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Democratizing coding so regular people can get the most out of computers is the opposite of oppression. You are mistaking your interests for societies interests. It's the same with artists who are now pissed that regular people can manifest their artistic ideas without needing to go through an artist or spend years studying the craft. The artists are calling the AI companies oppressors because they are breaking the a…

> The artists are calling the AI companies oppressors because they are breaking the artist's stranglehold on the market.

Tt's because these companies profit from all the existing art without compensating the artists. Even worse, they are now putting the very people out of a job who (unwittingly) helped to create these tools in the first place. Not to mention how hurtful it must be for artists seeing their personal style imitated by a machine without their consent.

I totally see how it can empower regular people, but it also empowers the megacorps and bad actors. The jury is still out on whether AI is providing a net positive to society. Until then, let's not ignore the injustice and harm that went into creating these tools and the potential and real dangers that come with it.

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

#369

Post by inopinatus »

throwaway173738 wrote: post #351
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.

It matters for all the things you’d be able to justify paying a programmer for. What’s about to change is that there will be tons of these little one-off projects that previously nobody could justify paying $150/hr for. A mass democratization of software development. We’ve yet to see what that really looks like.

We already know what that looks like, because PHP happened.

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

#370

Post by antonvs »

klaussilveira wrote: post #325
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 made a similar comment on a different thread, but I think it also fits here: I think the disconnect between engineers is due to their own context. If you work with frontend applications, specially React/React Native/HTML/Mobile, your experience with LLMs is completely different than the experience of someone working with OpenGL, io_uring, libev and other lower level stuff. Sure, Opus 4.5 can one shot Windows utilit…

> It also can't do Rust really well, once you get to the meat of it. Not sure why that is

Because types are proofs and require global correctness, you can't just iterate, fix things locally, and wait until it breaks somewhere else that you also have to fix locally.

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