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

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

#581

Post by Krei-se »

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!

Insanely difficult to you maybe because you stopped learning. What you cannot create you don't understand.

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

#582

Post by Krei-se »

oncallthrow wrote: post #109

Yeah Opus 4.5 is a massive step change in my experience. I feel like I’m working with a peer, not a junior I’m having to direct. I can give it highly ambiguous and poorly specified tasks and it… just does it. I will note that my experience varies slightly by language though. I’ve found it’s not as good at typescript.

If its a peer to you now the Ai has evolved while you didn't

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

#583

Post by murukesh_s »

wiz21c wrote: post #570
coffeebeqn wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

Scary is that the LLM might have been trained on the entire open source code ever produced - which is far beyond human comprehension - and with ever growing capability (bigger context window, more training) my gut feeling is that, it would exceed human capability in programming pretty soon. Considering 2025 was the ground breaking year for agents, can't stop imagine what would happen when it iterates in the next couple of years. I think it would evolve to be like Chess playing engines that consistently beat top Chess players in the world!

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

#584

Post by hollowturtle »

blibble wrote: post #271
YesBox wrote: post #245

I've noticed a huge drop in negative comments on HN when discussing LLMs in the last 1-2 months. All the LLM coded projects I've seen shared so far[1] have been tech toys though. I've watched things pop up on my twitter feed (usually games related), then quietly go off air before reaching a gold release (I manually keep up to date with what I've found, so it's not the algorithm). I find this all very interesting: LLM…

> I've noticed a huge drop in negative comments on HN when discussing LLMs in the last 1-2 months. real people get fed up of debating the same tired "omg new model 1000x better now" posts/comments from the astroturfers, the shills and their bots each time OpenAI shits out a new model (article author is a Microslop employee)

Simply this ^ I'm tired of debating bots and people paid to grow the hype, so I won't anymore I'll just work and look for the hype passing by from a distance. In the meanwhile I'll keep waiting for people making actual products with LLMs that will kill old generation products like windows, excel, teams, gmail etc that will replace slop with great ui/ux and push really performant apps

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

#585

Post by suzzer99 »

thousand_nights wrote: post #56
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.

these models work best when you know what you want to achieve and it helps you get there while you guide it. "Improve anything you can find" sounds like you didn't really know

"Improve anything you can find" is like going to your mechanic and saying "I'm going on a long road trip, can you tell me anything that needs to be fixed?"

They're going to find a lot of stuff to fix.

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

#586

Post by tripledry »

weatherlite wrote: post #562
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 perso…

Sure, IF the performance + economics is there. But that doesn't sound like an enjoyable profession to me.

I enjoy the plan, think, code cycle - it's just fun.

My brain has problems with not understanding how the thing I'm delivering works, maybe I'll get used to it.

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

#588

Post by weatherlite »

tripledry wrote: post #586
weatherlite wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 perso…

Sure, IF the performance + economics is there. But that doesn't sound like an enjoyable profession to me. I enjoy the plan, think, code cycle - it's just fun. My brain has problems with not understanding how the thing I'm delivering works, maybe I'll get used to it.

To me it's more of a mixed bag. On the one hand - disheartening to see how the knowledge base and skills I've worked more than a decade to develop became of little value (not worthless, but not as valuable as before). Also - yeah, the speed of delivery that is going to be expected of devs will make it so we will not be able to hold all the pieces in our heads and rely on A.I (when things break it will suck, hopefully A.I will be able to get us out of the jam). This is also not enjoyable to me.

On the other hand : way less time spent on being stuck on yarn/pip dependency issues, docker , obscure bugs , annoying css bugs etc etc. You can really focus on the task at hand and not spend hours/days trying to figure out something silly.

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

#589

Post by p0w3n3d » 

  Disclaimer: This post was written by a human and edited for spelling, grammer by Haiku 4.5
I recently am finishing the reading of Mistborn series, so please do not read further unless you want a spoiler.

  SPOILER
There is a suspicion that mists can change written text.

  END OF SPOILER
So how can we be sure that Haiku didn't change the text in favour of AI then?

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

#590

Post by lomase »

qingcharles wrote: post #534
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 had Opus write a whole app for me in 30 seconds the other night. I use a very extensive AGENTS.md to guide AI in how I like my code chiseled. I've been happily running the app without looking at a line of it, but I was discussing the app with someone today, so I popped the code open to see what it looked like. Perfect. 10/10 in every way. I would not have written it that good. It came up with at least one idea I wo…

Can you show us that amazing 10/10 app?
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