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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

#441

Post by boppo1 »

wilg wrote: post #349
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…

you can definitely just tell it what abstractions you want when adding a feature and do incremental work on existing codebase. but i generally prefer gpt-5.2

I've been using 5.2 a lot lately but hit my quota for the first time (and will probably continue to hit it most weeks) so I shelled out for claude code. What differences do you notice? Any 'metagame' that would be helpful?

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

#443

Post by gpm »

theappsecguy wrote: post #442

It’s incredibly tiring to see this narrative peddled every damn day. I use opus 4.5 every day. It’s not much different than any previous models, still does dumb things all the time.

Same experience - I've had it fail at the same reasonably simple tasks I had opus 4 and sonnet 4.5 and sonnet 4 fail at when they aren't carefully guided and their work check and fixed...

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

#444

Post by magicalist »

Havoc wrote: post #418
le-mark wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So "pretty good at picking up existing codebases" so long as the existing codebase is all microservices.

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

#445

Post by parpfish »

kaashif wrote: post #425
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #393

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. 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.

If you are heavily using LLMs, you need to change the way you think about reviews

I think most people now approach it as: Dev0 uses an LLM to build a feature super fast, Dev1 spends time doing a in depth review.

Dev0 built it, Dev1 reviewed it. And Dev0 is happy because they used the tool to save time!

But what should happen is that Dev0 should take all that time they saved coding and reallocate it to the in depth review.

The LLM wrote it, Dev0 reviewed it, Dev1 double-reviewed it. Time savings are much less, but there’s less context switching between being a coder and a reviewer. We are all reviewers now all the time

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

#446

Post by rectang »

whatever1 wrote: post #392
estimator7292 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundamental assumption is completely wrong. Code is not a cheap commodity. It is in fact so disastrously expensive that the entire US economy is about to implode while we're unbolting jet engines from old planes to fire up in the parking lots of datacenters for electricity.

It is massively cheaper than an overseas engineer. A cheap engineer can pump out maybe 1000 lines of low quality code in an hour. So like 10k tokens per hour for $50. So best case scenario $5/1000 tokens. LLMS are charging like $5 per million of tokens. And even if it is subsidized 100x it is still cheaper an order of magnitude than an overseas engineer. Not to mention speed. An LLM will spit out 1000 lines in second…

Here’s a story about productivity measured by lines of code that’s 40 years old so it must surely be wrong:

https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

> When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000

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

#447

Post by coryrc »

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.

When I worked at Google, people rarely got promoted for doing that. They got promoted for delivering features or sometimes from rescuing a failing project because everyone was doing the former until promotion velocity dropped and your good people left to other projects not yet bogged down too far.

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

#448

Post by colechristensen »

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…

>day to day, when I ask it "build me this feature" it uses strange abstractions, and often requires several attempts on my part to do it in the way I consider "right"

Then don't ask it to "build me this feature" instead lay out a software development process with designated human in the loop where you want it and guard rails to keep it on track. Create a code review agent to look for and reject strange abstractions. Tell it what you don't like and it's really good at finding it.

I find Opus 4.5, properly prompted, to be significantly better at reviewing code than writing it, but you can just put it in a loop until the code it writes matches the review.

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

#449

Post by saxenaabhi »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #437
FloorEgg wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> 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.

You slipped in "societally-meaningful" and I don't know what it means and don't want to debate merits/demerits of socialism/capitalism.

However I think lots of software needs to be written because in my estimation with AI/LLM/ML it'll generate value.

And then you have lots of software that needs to rewritten as firms/technologies die and new firms/technologies are born.

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

#450

Post by takinola »

I guess the best analogy I can think of is the transition from writing assembly language and the introduction of compilers. Now, (almost) no one knows, or cares, what comes out of the compiler. We just assume it is optimized and that it represents the source code faithfully. Seems like code might go that way too and people will focus on the right prompts and can simply assume the code will be correct.
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