Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

burkeholland.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 1001 posts

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

#471

Post by acosmism »

simonw wrote: post #289
bombdailer wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The type of people to use AI are necessarily the people who will struggle most when it comes time to do the last essential 20% of the work that AI can't do. Once thinking is required to bring all the parts into a whole, the person who gives over their thinking skills to AI will not be equipped to do the work, either because they never had the capacity to begin with or because AI has smoothed out the ripples of their…

Using AI tools makes me think harder.

harder != better

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

#472

Post by doxeddaily »

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…

I also have >30 years and I've had the same experience. I noticed an immediate improvement with 4.5 and I've been getting great results in general.

And yes I do make sure it's not generating crazy architecture. It might do that.. if you let it. So don't let it.

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

#473

Post by tac19 »

ivanech wrote: post #355
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…

I find Opus 4.5 very, very strong at matching the prevailing conventions/idioms/abstractions in a large, established codebase. But I guess I'm quite sensitive to this kind of thing so I explicitly ask Opus 4.5 to read adjacent code which is perhaps why it does it so well. All it takes is a sentence or two, though.

> ask Opus 4.5 to read adjacent code which is perhaps why it does it so well. All it takes is a sentence or two, though.

People keep telling me that an LLM is not intelligence, it's simply spitting out statistically relevant tokens. But surely it takes intelligence to understand (and actually execute!) the request to "read adjacent code".

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

#474

Post by latentsea »

Bridged7756 wrote: post #454
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.

Opus 4.5 is writing code that Opus 5.0 will refactor and extend. And Opus 5.5 will take that code and rewrite it in C from the ground up. And Opus 6.0 will take that code and make it assembly. And Opus 7.0 will design its own CPU. And Opus 8.0 will make a factory for its own CPUs. And Opus 9.0 will populate mars. And Opus 10.0 will be able to achieve AGI. And Opus 11.0 will find God. And Opus 12.0 will make us a time…

Can't wait to see what Opus 13.0 does with the multiverse.

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

#475

Post by Ericson2314 »

saxenaabhi wrote: post #449
Ericson2314 wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I didn't mean to do some snide anticaptialism. Making new Postgreses and blenders is really hard. I don't think the startup ecosystem does a very good job, but I don't assume central planning would do a much better job either.

(The method I have the most confidence in is some sort of mixed system where there is non-profit, state-planned, and startup software development all at once.)

Markets are a tool, a means to the end. I think they're very good, I'm a big fan! But they are not an excuse not to think about the outcome we want.

I'm confident that the outcome I don't want is where most software developers are trying to find demand for their work, pivoting etc. it's very "pushing a string" or "cart before the horse". I want more "pull" where the users/benefiaries of software are better able to dictate or create themselves what they want, rather than being helpless until a pivoting engineer finds it for them.

Basically start-up culture has combined theories of exogenous growth from technology change, and a baseline assumption that most people are and will remain hopelessly computer illiterate, into an ideology that assumes the best software is always "surprising", a paradigm shift, etc.

Startups that make libraries/tools for other software developers are fortunately a good step in undermining these "the customer is an idiot and the product will be better than they expect" assumptions. That gives me hope we're reach a healthier mix of push and pull. Wild successes are always disruptive, but that shouldn't mean that the only success is wild, or trying to "act disruptive before wild success" ("manifest" paradigm shifts!) is always the best means to get there.

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

#476

Post by jackdoe »

most of software engineering was rational, now it is becoming empirical

it is quite strange, you have to make it write the code in a way it can reason about it without it reading it, you also have to feel the code without reading all of it. like a blind man feeling the shape of an object; Shape from Darkness

you can ask opus to make a car, it will give you a car, then you ask it for navigation; no problem, it uses google maps works perfect

then you ask it to improve the breaks, and it will give internet to the tires and the break pedal, and the pedal will send a signal via ipv6 to the tires which will enable a very well designed local breaking system, why not, we already have internet for google maps.

i think the new software engineering is 10 times harder than the old one :)

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

#477

Post by potamic »

sreekanth850 wrote: post #419
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 thi…

How did he not share code if you're working together?

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

#478

Post by pugworthy »

sothatsit wrote: post #321
honeycrispy wrote: post #26

A couple weeks ago I had Opus 4.5 go over my project and improve anything it could find. It "worked" but the architecture decisions it made were baffling, and had many, many bugs. I had to rewrite half of the code. I'm not an AI hater, I love AI for tests, finding bugs, and small chores. Opus is great for specific, targeted tasks. But don't ask it to do any general architecture, because you'll be soon to regret it.

I like these examples that predictably show the weaknesses of current models. This reminds me of that example where someone asked an agent to improve a codebase in a loop overnight and they woke up to 100,000 lines of garbage [0]. Similarly you see people doing side-by-side of their implementation and what an AI did, which can also quite effectively show how AI can make quite poor architecture decisions. This is why…

To me, this doesn't show the weakness of current models, it shows the variability of prompts and the influence on responses. Because without the prompt it's hard to tell what influenced the outcome.

I had this long discussion today with a co-worker about the merits of detailed queries with lots of guidance .md documents, vs just asking fairly open ended questions. Spelling out in great detail what you want, vs just generally describing what you want the outcomes to be in general then working from there.

His approach was to write a lot of agent files spelling out all kinds of things like code formatting style, well defined personas, etc. And here's me asking vague questions like, "I'm thinking of splitting off parts of this code base into a separate service, what do you think in general? Are there parts that might benefit from this?"

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

#479

Post by devinplatt »

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.

In my experience, using LLMs to code encouraged me to write better documentation, because I can get better results when I feed the documentation to the LLM.

Also, I've noticed failure modes in LLM coding agents when there is less clarity and more complexity in abstractions or APIs. It's actually made me consider simplifying APIs so that the LLMs can handle them better.

Though I agree that in specific cases what's helpful for the model and what's helpful for humans won't always overlap. Once I actually added some comments to a markdown file as note to the LLM that most human readers wouldn't see, with some more verbose examples.

I think one of the big problems in general with agents today is that if you run the agent long enough they tend to "go off the rails", so then you need to babysit them and intervene when they go off track.

I guess in modern parlance, maintaining a good codebase can be framed as part of a broader "context engineering" problem.

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

#480

Post by BobbyJo »

gabriel-uribe wrote: post #465
BobbyJo wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does the corner bakery need a moat to be a business? How many people understand the underlying operating system their code runs on? Can even read assembly or C? Even before LLMs, there were plenty of copy-paste JS bootcamp grads that helped people build software businesses.

> Does the corner bakery need a moat to be a business?

Yes, actually. Its hard to open a competing bakery due to location availability, permitting, capex, and the difficulty of converting customers.

To add to that, food establishments generally exist on next to no margin, due to competition, despite all of that working in their favor.

Now imagine what the competitive landscape for that bakery would look like if all of that friction for new competitors disappeared. Margin would tend toward zero.

Post reply on HN