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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

#501

Post by melagonster »

fenwick67 wrote: post #336
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…

Another thing that gets me with projects like this, there are already many examples of image converters, minesweeper clones etc that you can just fork on GitHub, the value of the LLM here is largely just stripping the copyright off

- I cloned a project from GitHub and made some minor modifications.

- I used AI-assisted programming to create a project.

Even if the content is identical, or if the AI is smart enough to replicate the project by itself, the latter can be included on a CV.

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

#502

Post by FeepingCreature »

zarzavat wrote: post #487
josu wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 co…

How are you qualified to judge its performance on real code if you don't know how to write a hello world? Yes, LLMs are very good at writing code, they are so good at writing code that they often generate reams of unmaintainable spaghetti. When you submit to an informatics contest you don't have paying customers who depend on your code working every day. You can just throw away yesterday's code and start afresh. Clau…

> How are you qualified to judge its performance on real code if you don't know how to write a hello world?

The ultimate test of all software is "run it and see if it's useful for you." You do not need to be a programmer at all to be qualified to test this.

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

#504

Post by BatteryMountain »

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…

The crazy part is, once you have it setup and adapted your workflow, you start to notice all sorts of other "small" things:

claude can call ssh and do system admin tasks. It works amazingly well. I have 3 VM's, which depends on each other (proxmox with openwrt, adguard, unbound), and claude can prove to me that my dns chains works perfectly, my firewalls are perfect etc as claude can ssh into each. Setting up services, diagnosing issues, auditing configs... you name it. Just awesome.

claude can call other sh scripts on the machine, so over time, you can create a bunch of scripts that lets claude one shot certain tasks that would normally eat tokens. It works great. One script per intention - don't have a script do more than one thing.

claude can call the compiler, run the debug executable and read the debug logs.. in real time. So claude can read my android apps debug stream via adb.. or my C# debug console because claude calls the compiler, not me. Just ask it to do it and it will diagnose stuff really quickly.

It can also analyze your db tables (give it readonly sql access), look at the application code and queries, and diagnose performance issues.

The opportunities are endless here. People need to wake up to this.

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

#505

Post by sponnath »

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.

Refactoring does always cost something and I doubt LLMs will ever change that. The more interesting question is whether the cost to refactor or "rewrite" the software will ever become negligible. Until it isn't, it's short-sighted to write code in the manner you're describing. If software does become that cheap, then you can't meaningfully maintain a business on selling software anyway.

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

#507

Post by lelandfe »

subomi wrote: post #497
lelandfe wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a quite senior frontend using React and even I see Sonnet 4.5 struggle with basic things. Today it wrote my Zod validation incorrectly, mixing up versions, then just decided it wasn't working and attempted to replace the entire thing with a different library.

Why do we all of a sudden hold these agents to some unrealistic high bar? Engineers write bugs all the time and write incorrect validations. But we iterate. We read the stacktrace in Sentry and realise what the hell I was thinking when I wrote that, and we fix things. If you're going to benefit from these agents, you'd need to be a bit more patient and point them correctly to your codebase. My rule of thumb is that i…

my unrealistic bar lies somewhere above "pick a new library" bug resolution

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

#508

Post by coffeebeqn »

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…

Anecdata but I’ve found Claude code with Opus 4.5 able to do many of my real tickets in real mid and large codebases at a large public startup. I’m at senior level (15+ years). It can browse and figure out the existing patterns better than some engineers on my team. It used a few rare features in the codebase that even I had forgotten about and was about to duplicate. To me it feels like a real step change from the previous models I’ve used which I found at best useless. It’s following style guides and existing patterns well, not just greenfield. Kind of impressive, kind of scary

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

#509

Post by tommica »

sreekanth850 wrote: post #494
potamic wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

yes, it was my mistake. I trusted him because he was my childhood friend and my cousin. He was a tech lead in CMMI Level 5 (serving fortune 500 firms) company at the time he joined with me. I had the trust that he will never ran away with the code and that trust is still there, also the entire feature, roadmap and vision was with me, so I thought code doesn't matter. It was a big learning for me.

That's a crazy story. That confrontation must have been a difficult one :/
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