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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

#561

Post by ku1ik »

ryandrake wrote: post #198
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really think a lof of people tried AI coding earlier, got frustrated at the errors and gave up. That's where the rejection of all these doomer predictions comes from. And I get it. Coding with Claude Code really was prompting something, getting errors, and asking it to fix it. Which was still useful but I could see why a skilled coder adding a feature to a complex codebase would just give up Opus 4.5 really is at a…

This was me. I was a huge AI coding detractor on here for a while (you can check my comment history). But, in order to stay informed and not just be that grouchy curmudgeon all the time, I kept up with the models and regularly tried them out. Opus 4.5 is so much better than anything I've tried before, I'm ready to change my mind about AI assistance. I even gave -True Vibe Coding- a whirl. Yesterday, from a blank dire…

How do you know “it has no memory leaks, crashes, ANRs, no performance problems, no network latency bugs or anything” if you built it just yesterday? Isn’t it a bit too early for claims like this? I get it’s easy to bring ideas to life but aren’t we overly optimistic?

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

#562

Post by weatherlite »

tripledry wrote: post #549

Putting the performance aside for now as I just started trying out Opus 4.5, can't say too much yet, I don't hype or hate AI as of now, it's simply useful. Time will tell what happens, but if programming becomes "prompt engineering", I'm planning on quitting my job and pivoting to something else. It's nice to get stuff working fast, but AI just sucks the joy out of building for me. Trying to not feel the pressure/anx…

> Time will tell what happens, but if programming becomes "prompt engineering", I'm planning on quitting my job and pivoting to something else. It's nice to get stuff working fast, but AI just sucks the joy out of building for me.

I hear you but I think many companies will change the role ; you'll get the technical ownership + big chunks of the data/product/devops responsibility. I'm speculating but I think one person can take that on himself with the new tools and deliver tremendous value. I don't know how they'll call this new role though, we'll see.

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

#563

Post by qnleigh »

So much of the conversation is around these models replacing software engineers. But the use cases described in the article sound like pretty compelling business opportunities; if the custom apps he built for his wife's business have been useful, probably there are lots of businesses that would pay for the service he just provided his wife. Small, custom apps can be made way more cheaply now, so Jeven's paradox says that demand should go up. I think it will.

I would love to hear from some freelance programmers how LLMs have changed their work in the last two years.

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

#564

Post by enraged_camel »

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.

>> 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.

So you gave it an poorly defined task, and it failed?

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

#565

Post by ath3nd »

qnleigh wrote: post #563

So much of the conversation is around these models replacing software engineers. But the use cases described in the article sound like pretty compelling business opportunities; if the custom apps he built for his wife's business have been useful, probably there are lots of businesses that would pay for the service he just provided his wife. Small, custom apps can be made way more cheaply now, so Jeven's paradox says…

[dead]

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

#566

Post by raesene9 »

qnleigh wrote: post #563

So much of the conversation is around these models replacing software engineers. But the use cases described in the article sound like pretty compelling business opportunities; if the custom apps he built for his wife's business have been useful, probably there are lots of businesses that would pay for the service he just provided his wife. Small, custom apps can be made way more cheaply now, so Jeven's paradox says…

One problem with the idea of making businesses out of this kind of application is actually mentioned in passing in the article

"I decided to make up for my dereliction of duties by building her another app for her sign business that would make her life just a bit more delightful - and eliminate two other apps she is currently paying for"

OP used Opus to re-write existing applications that his wife was paying for. So now any time you make a commercial app and try to sell it, you're up against everyone with access to Opus or similar tooling who can replicate your application, exactly to their own specifications.

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

#567

Post by socalgal2 »

qnleigh wrote: post #563

So much of the conversation is around these models replacing software engineers. But the use cases described in the article sound like pretty compelling business opportunities; if the custom apps he built for his wife's business have been useful, probably there are lots of businesses that would pay for the service he just provided his wife. Small, custom apps can be made way more cheaply now, so Jeven's paradox says…

A coworker who’s never coded has made 25 small work automation/helper apps using ai vibe coding.

She doesn’t need to hire anyone

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

#568

Post by friendzis »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #552
tripledry wrote: post #549

Putting the performance aside for now as I just started trying out Opus 4.5, can't say too much yet, I don't hype or hate AI as of now, it's simply useful. Time will tell what happens, but if programming becomes "prompt engineering", I'm planning on quitting my job and pivoting to something else. It's nice to get stuff working fast, but AI just sucks the joy out of building for me. Trying to not feel the pressure/anx…

Pity, prompt engineering is just another kind of programming, I find it to be fun, but I guess lots of other people would see it differently.

The venn diagram of engineering and prompting is two circles, maybe a tiny overlap with integrated environments like claude code.

A program, by definition, is analyzable and repeatable, whereas prompting is anything but that.

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

#569

Post by HDThoreaun »

blahblaher wrote: post #121
OldGreenYodaGPT wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company pays for the team Claude code plan which is like $200 a month for each dev. The workflows cost like 10 - 50 cents a PR

It will have to quintuple or more to make business sense for Anthropic. Sure, still cheaper than a full time developer, but don't expect it to stay at $200 for a long time. And then, when you explain to your boss how amazing it is, and can do all this work so easily and quickly, it's when your boss start asking the real question: what am I paying you for?

Im not sure about this. What they really need is to get rid of the free tier and widespread adoption. Inference on the $200 plan seems to be profitable right now so they just need more users to amortize training costs.

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

#570

Post by wiz21c »

coffeebeqn wrote: post #508
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 p…

Same anecdote for me (except I'm +/- 40 years experience). I consider my self a pretty good dev for non-web dev (GPU's, assembly, optimisation,...) and my conclusion is the same as you: impressive and scary. If the somehow the idea of what you want to do is on the web in text or in code, then Claude most likely has it. And its ability to understand my own codebases is just crazy (at my age, memory is declining and having Claude to help is just waow). Of course it fails some times, of course it need direction, but the thing it produces is really good.
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