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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

#421

Post by maplethorpe »

whynotminot wrote: post #416
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.

Yeah I think it's a mistake to focus on writing "readable" or even "maintainable" code. We need to let go of these aging paradigms and be open to adopting a new one.

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

#422

Post by Sxubas »

Just an open thought, what if most improvement we are seeing is not mostly due to LLM improvements but to context management and better prompting?

Ofc the reality is a mix of both, but really curious on what contributes more.

Probably just using cursor with old models (eww) can yield a quick response.

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

#423

Post by [deleted] »

whynotminot wrote: post #416
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.

[deleted]

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

#424

Post by foldingmoney »

maplethorpe wrote: post #421
whynotminot wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yeah I think it's a mistake to focus on writing "readable" or even "maintainable" code. We need to let go of these aging paradigms and be open to adopting a new one.

as depressing as it is to say, i think it's a bit like the year is 1906 and we're complaining that these new tyres for cars they're making are bad because they're no longer backwards compatible with the horse drawn wagons we might want to attach them to in the future.

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

#425

Post by kaashif »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #393
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. The number of production applications that achieve this rounds to zero I’ve probably managed 300 brownfield web, mobile, edge, datacenter, data processing and ML applications/products across DoD, B2B, consumer and literally zero of them were built in t…

I think there is a subjective difference. When a human builds dogshit at least you know they put some effort and the hours in.

When I'm reading piles of LLM slop, I know that just reading it is already more effort than it took to write. It feels like I'm being played.

This is entirely subjective and emotional. But when someone writes something with an LLM in 5 seconds and asks me to spend hours reviewing...fuck off.

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

#426

Post by alexjplant »

maplethorpe wrote: post #421
whynotminot wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yeah I think it's a mistake to focus on writing "readable" or even "maintainable" code. We need to let go of these aging paradigms and be open to adopting a new one.

> Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture which says that any parodic or sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken for a sincere expression of those views.

The things you mentioned are important but have been on their way out for years now regardless of LLMs. Have my ambivalent upvote regardless.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

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

#427

Post by daxfohl »

This resonates with my experience in codex 5.2, at least directionally. I'm pretty persnickety about code itself, so I'm not to the point where I'll just let it rip. But in the last month or two things have gone from "I'll ask on the web interface and maybe copy some code into the project", to trusting the agent and getting a reasonable starting point about half the time.

> because models like to write code WAY more than they like to delete it

Yeah, this is the big one. I haven't figured it out either. New or changing requirements are almost always implemented a flurry of if/else branches all over the place, rather than taking the time for a step back and a reimagining of a cohesive integration of old and new. I've had occasional luck asking for this explicitly, but far more frequently they'll respond with recommendations that are far more mechanical, e.g. "you could extract a function for these two lines of code that you repeat twice", not architectural, in nature. (I still find pasting a bunch of files into the chat interface and iterating on refinements conversationally to be faster and produce better results).

That said, I'm convinced now that it'll get there sooner or later. At that point, I really don't know what purpose SWEs will serve. For a while we might serve as go-betweens between the coding agent and PMs, but LLMs are already way better at translating from tech jargon to human, so I can't imagine it would be long before product starts bypassing us and talking directly to the agents, who (err, which) can respond with various design alternatives, pros and cons of each, identify all the dependencies, possible compatibility concerns, alignment with future direction, migration time, compute cost, user education and adoption tracking, etc, all in real time in fluent PM-ese. IDK what value I add to that equation.

For the last year or so I figured we'd probably hit a wall before AI got to that point, but over the last month or so, I'm convinced it's only a matter of time.

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

#428

Post by Ericson2314 »

whynotminot wrote: post #416
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.

We don't know what Opus 5.0 will be able to refactor.

If argument is "humans and Opus 4.5 cannot maintain this, but if requirements change we can vibe-code a new one from scratch", that's a coherent thesis, but people need to be explicit about this.

(Instead this feels like the mott that is retreated to, and the bailey is essentially "who cares, we'll figure out what to do with our fresh slop later".)

Ironically, I've been Claude to be really good at refactors, but these are refactors I choose very explicitly. (Such as I start the thing manually, then let it finish.) (For an example of it, see me force-pushing to https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/14863 implementing my own code review.)

But I suspect this is not what people want. To actually fire devs and not rely on from-scratch vibe-coding, we need to figure out which refactors to attempt in order to implement a given feature well.

That's a very creative open-ended question that I haven't even tried to let the LLMs take a crack at it, because why I would I? I'm plenty fast being the "ideas guy". If the LLM had better ideas than me, how would I even know? I'm either very arrogant or very good because I cannot recall regretting one of my refactors, at least not one I didn't back out of immediately.

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

#430

Post by BobbyJo »

whynotminot wrote: post #416
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.

Up until now, no business has been built on tools and technology that no one understands. I expect that will continue.

Given that, I expect that, even if AI is writing all of the code, we will still need people around who understand it.

If AI can create and operate your entire business, your moat is nil. So, you not hiring software engineers does not matter, because you do not have a business.

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