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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

#431

Post by chandureddyvari »

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…

Came across official anthropic repo on gh actions very relevant to what you mentioned. Your idea on scheduled doc updation using llm is brilliant, I’m stealing this idea. https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code-action

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

#432

Post by indigodaddy »

everfrustrated wrote: post #357
ern wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been out of the loop for a couple of months (vacation). I tried Claude Opus 4.5 at the end of November 2025 with the corporate Github Copilot subscription in Agent mode and it was awful: basically ignoring code and hallucinating. My team is using it with Claude Code and say it works brilliantly, so I'll be giving it another go. How much of the value comes from Opus 4.5, how much comes from Claude Code, and how…

As someone coming from GitHub copilot in vscode and recently trying Claude Code plugin for vscode I don't get the fuss about Claude. Copilot has by far the best and most intuitive agent UI. Just make sure you're in agent mode and choose Sonnet or Opus models. I've just cancelled my Claude sub and gone back and will upgrade to the GH Pro+ to get more sonnet/opus.

Check out Antigravity+Google AI Pro $20 plan+Opus 4.5. apparently the Opus limits are insanely generous (of course that could change on a dime).

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

#433

Post by indigodaddy »

Kerrick wrote: post #294
chaostheory wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were they able to link Antigravity to your paid subscription? I have a Google ultra AI sub and antigrav ran out of credits within 30 minutes for me. Of course that was a few weeks ago, and I’m hoping that they fixed this

Yes. I was on a 30-day trial of Google AI Pro and I got a few big wins each out of Gemini 3 Pro (High) and Claude 4.5 Opus (Thinking) before my quota got reset. Then I'd cycle through Gemini 3 Flash and Amp Free (or paid Junie credits if I got antsy) until my quota reset. You can see this pattern in my AI attribution commit footers. It was such a noticeable difference to me that I signed up for Google AI Ultra. I got…

Limits reset every 5 hours on the pro plan right?

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

#434

Post by smw »

vercaemert wrote: post #106
enum wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I teach at a university, and spend plenty of time programming for research and for fun. Like many others, I spent some time on the holidays trying to push the current generation of Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex as far as I could. (They're all very good.) I had an idea for something that I wanted, and in five scattered hours, I got it good enough to use. I'm thinking about it in a few different ways: 1. I estimate I…

How do you compare Claude Code to Cursor? I'm a Cursor user quietly watching the CC parade with curiosity. Personally, I haven't been able to give up the IDE experience.

Just FYI, these days cc has 'ide integration' too, it's not just a cli. Grab the vscode extension.

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

#435

Post by jesse_dot_id »

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…

This has also been my experience.

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

#436

Post by varenc »

heavyset_go wrote: post #297
simonw wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, Codex doesn't have permission to install random software on my machine and then execute it to see if it's real or a hallucination. CLI utility here means software with a CLI, not classic Unix-y CLI tools. The WebDav hallucinations happened in the chat interface.

It's not an all or nothing permission. How I use claude code it has to ask me for permission for every CLI tool use. This seems like reasonable way to balance security with utility and would allow the agent to correct itself when it hallucinates CLI tools. Or just run it in an isolated container where it can't break anything and give it full perms.

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

#437

Post by Ericson2314 »

FloorEgg wrote: post #333
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 proacti…

I know what you are talking about, but there is more to life than just product-market fit.

Hardly any of us are working on Postgres, Photoshop, blender, etc. but it's not just cope to wish we were.

It's good to think about the needs to business and the needs of society separately. Yes, the thing needs users, or no one is benefiting. But it also needs to do good for those users, and ultimately, at the highest caliber, craftsmanship starts to matter again.

There are legitimate reasons for the startup ecosystem to focus firstly and primarily on getting the users/customers. I'm not arguing against that. What I am arguing is why does the industry need to be dominated by startups in terms of the bulk of the products (not bulk of the users). It begs the question of how much societally-meaningful programming waiting to be done.

I'm hoping for a world where more end users code (vibe or otherwise) and the solve their own problems with their own software. I think that will make more a smaller, more elite software industry that is more focused on infrastructure than last-mile value capture. The question is how to fund the infrastructure. I don't know except for the most elite projects, which is not good enough for the industry (even this hypothetical smaller one) on the whole.

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

#438

Post by nine_k »

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.

This sounds like magical thinking.

For one, there are objectively detrimental ways to organize code: tight coupling, lots of mutable shared state, etc. No matter who or what reads or writes the code, such code is more error-prone, and more brittle to handle.

Then, abstractions are tools to lower the cognitive load. Good abstractions reduce the total amount of code written, allow to reason about the code in terms of these abstractions, and do not leak in the area of their applicability. Say Sequence, or Future, or, well, function are examples of good abstractions. No matter what kind of cognitive process handles the code, it benefits from having to keep a smaller amount of context per task.

"Code structure does not matter, LLMs will handle it" sounds a bit like "Computer architectures don't matter, the Turing Machine is proved to be able to handle anything computable at all". No, these things matter if you care about resource consumption (aka cost) at the very least.

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

#439

Post by Loocid »

simonw wrote: post #153

Opus 4.5 really is something else. I've been having a ton of fun throwing absurdly difficult problems at it recently and it keeps on surprising me. A JavaScript interpreter written in Python? How about a WebAssembly runtime in Python? How about porting BurntSushi's absurdly great Rust optimized string search routines to C and making them faster ? And these are mostly just casual experiments, often run from my phone!

I'm not super surprised that these examples worked well. They are complex and a ton of work, but the problems are relatively well defined with tons of documentation online. Sounds ideal for an LLM no?

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

#440

Post by MarsIronPI »

It worries me that the best models, the ones that can one-shot apps and such, are all non-free and owned by companies who can't be trusted to have end-users' best interests at heart. It would be greatly reassuring to see a self-hostable model that can compete with Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3 at such coding tasks.
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