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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

#411

Post by josu »

mcv wrote: post #133

Opus 4.5 ate through my Copilot quota last month, and it's already halfway through it for this month. I've used it a lot, for really complex code. And my conclusion is: it's still not as smart as a good human programmer. It frequently got stuck, went down wrong paths, ignored what I told it to do to do something wrong, or even repeat a previous mistake I had to correct. Yet in other ways, it's unbelievably good. I ca…

>So my verdict is that it's great for code analysis, and it's fantastic for injecting some book knowledge on complex topics into your programming, but it can't tackle those complex problems by itself.

I don't think you've seen the full potential. I'm currently #1 on 5 different very complex computer engineering problems, and I can't even write a "hello world" in rust or cpp. You no longer need to know how to write code, you just need to understand the task at a high level and nudge the agents in the right direction. The game has changed.

- https://highload.fun/tasks/3/leaderboard

- https://highload.fun/tasks/12/leaderboard

- https://highload.fun/tasks/15/leaderboard

- https://highload.fun/tasks/18/leaderboard

- https://highload.fun/tasks/24/leaderboard

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

#412

Post by what »

llm_nerd wrote: post #381
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…

"its building it the right way, in an easily understood way, in a way that's easily extensible" I am in a unique situation where I work with a variety of codebases over the week. I have had no problem at all utilizing Claude Code w/ Opus 4.5 and Gemini CLI w/ Gemini 3.0 Pro to make excellent code that is indisputably "the right way", in an extremely clear and understandable way, and that is maximally extensible. None…

>llm_nerd >created two years ago

You AI hype thots/bots are all the same. All these claims but never backed up with anything to look at. And also alway claiming “you’re holding it wrong”.

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

#413

Post by pigpop »

pigpop wrote: post #410
koyote wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A greenfield project is definitely 'easy mode' for an LLM; especially if the problem area is well understood (and documented). Opus is great and definitely speeds up development even in larger code bases and is reasonably good at matching coding style/standard to that of of the existing code base. In my opinion, the big issue is the relatively small context that quickly overwhelms the models when given a larger task…

You have to think of Opus as a developer whose job at your company lasts somewhere between 30 to 60 minutes before you fire them and hire a new one. Yes, it's absurd but it's a better metaphor than someone with a chronic long term memory deficit since it fits into the project management framework neatly. So this new developer who is starting today is ready to be assigned their first task, they're very eager to get st…

Follow up: Opus is also great for doing the planning work before you start. You can use plan mode or just do it in a web chat and have them create all of the necessary files based on your explanation. The advantage of using plan mode is that they can explore the codebase in order to get a better understanding of things. The default at the end of plan mode is to go straight into implementation but if you're planning a large refactor or other significant work then I'd suggest having them produce the documentation outlined above instead and then following the workflow using a new session each time. You could use plan mode at the start of each session but I don't find this necessary most of the time unless I'm deviating from the initial plan.

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

#414

Post by throwaway173738 »

inopinatus wrote: post #369
throwaway173738 wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

php was still fundamentally a programming language you had to learn. This is “I wanted to make a program for my wife to do something she doesn’t have time to do manually” but made quickly with a machine. It’s probably going to do for programming what the Jacquard Loom did for cloth. Make it cheap enough that everyone can have lots of different shirts of their own style.

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

#415

Post by Ancapistani »

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.

> Their thesis is that code quality does not matter as it is now a cheap commodity.

That's not how I read it. I would say that it's more like "If a human no longer needs to read the code, is it important for it to be readable?"

That is, of course, based on the premise that AI is now capable of both generating and maintaining software projects of this size.

Oh, and it begs another question: are human-readable and AI-readable the same thing? If they're not, it very well could make sense to instruct the model to generate code that prioritizes what matters to LLMs over what matters to humans.

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

#416

Post by whynotminot »

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…

> The hard thing about engineering is not "building a thing that works", its building it the right way, in an easily understood way, in a way that's easily extensible.

You’re talking like in the year 2026 we’re still writing code for future humans to understand and improve.

I fear we are not doing that. Right now, Opus 4.5 is writing code that later Opus 5.0 will refactor and extend. And so on.

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

#417

Post by pigpop »

what wrote: post #412
llm_nerd wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"its building it the right way, in an easily understood way, in a way that's easily extensible" I am in a unique situation where I work with a variety of codebases over the week. I have had no problem at all utilizing Claude Code w/ Opus 4.5 and Gemini CLI w/ Gemini 3.0 Pro to make excellent code that is indisputably "the right way", in an extremely clear and understandable way, and that is maximally extensible. None…

>llm_nerd >created two years ago You AI hype thots/bots are all the same. All these claims but never backed up with anything to look at. And also alway claiming “you’re holding it wrong”.

I don't see how "two years ago" is incongruous with having been using LLMs for coding, it's exactly the timeline I would expect. Yes, some people do just post "git gud" but there are many people ITT and most of the others on LLM coding articles who are trying to explain their process to anyone who will listen. I'm not sure if it is fully explainable in a single comment though, I'd have to write a multi-part tutorial to cover everything but it's almost entirely just applying the same project management principles that you would in a larger team of developers but customized to the current limitations of LLMs. If you want full tutorials with examples I'm sure they're out there but I'd also just recommend reviewing some project management material and then seeing how you can apply it to a coding agent. You'll only really learn by doing.

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

#418

Post by Havoc »

le-mark wrote: post #403
Havoc wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> greenfield LLMs are pretty good at picking up existing codebases. Even with cleared context they can do „look at this codebase and this spec doc that created it. I want to add feature x“

What size of code base are you talking about? And this is your personal experience?

Overall Codebase size vs context matter less when you set it up as microservices style architecture from the starts.

I just split it into boundaries that make sense to me. Get the LLM to make a quick cheat sheet about the api and then feed that into adjacent modules. It doesn’t need to know everything about all of it to make changes if you’ve got a grip on big picture and the boundaries are somewhat sane

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

#419

Post by sreekanth850 »

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…

Same exist in humans also, I worked with a developer who had 15 year experience and was tech lead in a big Indian firm, We started something together, 3 months back when I checked the Tables I was shocked to see how he fucked up and messed the DB. Finally the only option left with me was to quit because i know it will break in production and if i onboarded a single customer my life would be screwed. He mixed many things with frontend and offloaded even permissions to frontend, and literally copied tables in multiple DB (We had 3 services). I still cannot believe how he worked as a tch lead for 15 years. each DB had more than 100 tables and out of that 20-25 were duplicates. He never shared code with me, but I smelled something fishy when bug fixing was never ending loop and my front end guy told me he cannot do it anymore. Only mistake I did was I trusted him and worst part is he is my cousin and the relation became sour after i confronted him and decided to quit.

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

#420

Post by oenton »

inopinatus wrote: post #369
throwaway173738 wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Side tangent: On one hand I have a subtle fondness for PHP, perhaps because it was the first programming language I ever “learned” (self taught, throwing spaghetti on the wall) back in high school when LAMP stacks were all the rage.

But in retrospect it’s absolutely baffling that mixing raw SQL queries with HTML tag soup wasn’t necessarily uncommon then. Also, I haven’t met many PHP developers that I’d recommend for a PHP job.

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