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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

#591

Post by lomase »

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…

Just one more OPUS bro.

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

#592

Post by kalaksi »

FloorEgg wrote: post #333
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…

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'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 proactively remind them what actually mattered to the business case.

My first thought was that you probably also have different biases, priorities and/or taste. As always, this is probably very context-specific and requires judgement to know when something goes too far. It's difficult to know the "most correct" approach beforehand.

> Sometimes hacking something together messily to confirm it's the right thing to be building is the right way. Then making sure it's secure, then finally paying down some technical debt to make it more maintainable and extensible.

I agree that sometimes it is, but in other cases my experience has been that when something is done, works and is used by customers, it's very hard to argue about refactoring it. Management doesn't want to waste hours on it (who pays for it?) and doesn't want to risk breaking stuff (or changing APIs) when it works. It's all reasonable.

And when some time passes, the related intricacies, bigger picture and initially floated ideas fade from memory. Now other stuff may depend on the existing implementation. People get used to the way things are done. It gets harder and harder to refactor things.

Again, this probably depends a lot on a project and what kind of software we're talking about.

> There's always a balance/tension, but it's when things go too far one way or another that I see avoidable failures.

I think balance/tension describes it well and good results probably require input from different people and from different angles.

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

#593

Post by port3000 »

deanc wrote: post #538
mcv wrote: post #133

Opus 4.5 ate through my Copilot quota last month, and it's already halfway through it for this month. I've used it a lot, for really complex code. And my conclusion is: it's still not as smart as a good human programmer. It frequently got stuck, went down wrong paths, ignored what I told it to do to do something wrong, or even repeat a previous mistake I had to correct. Yet in other ways, it's unbelievably good. I ca…

People are completely missing the points about agentic development. The model is obviously a huge factor in the quality of the output, but the real magic lies in how the tools are managing and injecting context in to them, as well as the tooling. I switched from Copilot to Cursor at the end of 2025, and it was absolute night and day in terms of how the agents behaved.

Interesting you have this opinion yet you're using Cursor instead of Claude Code. By the same logic, you should get even better results directly using Anthropic's wrapper for their own model.

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

#594

Post by dominicrose »

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…

Use Claude Code... to do what? There are multiple layers of people involved in the decision process and they only come up with a few ideas every now and then. Nothing I can't handle. AI helps but it doesn't have to be an agent.

I'm not saying there aren't use cases for agents, just that it's normal that most software engineers are sleeping on it.

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

#595

Post by CapsAdmin »

klaussilveira wrote: post #325
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…

I made a similar comment on a different thread, but I think it also fits here: I think the disconnect between engineers is due to their own context. If you work with frontend applications, specially React/React Native/HTML/Mobile, your experience with LLMs is completely different than the experience of someone working with OpenGL, io_uring, libev and other lower level stuff. Sure, Opus 4.5 can one shot Windows utilit…

I built an open to "game engine" entirely in Lua a many years ago, but relying on many third party libraries that I would bind to with FFI.

I thought I'd revive it, but this time with Vulkan and no third-party dependencies (except for Vulkan)

4.5 Sonet, Opus and Gemini 3.5 flash has helped me write image decoders for dds, png jpg, exr, a wayland window implementation, macOS window implementation, etc.

I find that Gemini 3.5 flash is really good at understanding 3d in general while sonnet might be lacking a little.

All these sota models seem to understand my bespoke Lua framework and the right level of abstraction. For example at the low level you have the generated Vulkan bindings, then after that you have objects around Vulkan types, then finally a high level pipeline builder and whatnot which does not mention Vulkan anywhere.

However with a larger C# codebase at work, they really struggle. My theory is that there are too many files and abstractions so that they cannot understand where to begin looking.

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

#596

Post by dajoh »

josu wrote: post #411
mcv wrote: post #133

Opus 4.5 ate through my Copilot quota last month, and it's already halfway through it for this month. I've used it a lot, for really complex code. And my conclusion is: it's still not as smart as a good human programmer. It frequently got stuck, went down wrong paths, ignored what I told it to do to do something wrong, or even repeat a previous mistake I had to correct. Yet in other ways, it's unbelievably good. I ca…

>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…

>I'm currently #1 on 5 different very complex computer engineering problems

Ah yes, well known very complex computer engineering problems such as:

* Parsing JSON objects, summing a single field

* Matrix multiplication

* Parsing and evaluating integer basic arithmetic expressions

And you're telling me all you needed to do to get the best solution in the world to these problems was talk to an LLM?

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

#597

Post by raesene9 »

ensocode wrote: post #580
raesene9 wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

so everybody is making their own apps for their specific problem? Sounds as it will get a mess in the end. So maybe it will be more about ideas and concepts and not so much about know how to code.

Yep vast numbers of personalized apps seems like it would end up being pretty messy. I think the challenge of betting on ideas and concepts is that once you've published something, someone else can take the idea and replicate it easily and cheaply, so it'll be harder to monetize unless you can come up with something that's hard to replicate.

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

#598

Post by missingdays »

ku1ik wrote: post #561
ryandrake wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

By tomorrow the app will be replaced with a new version from the other competitor, by that time the memory leak will not reveal itself

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

#599

Post by tripledry »

keychera wrote: post #576
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…

I have similar stance to you. LLM has been very useful for me but it doesn't really change the fun-ness of programming since my circumstances has allowed me find programming to be very fun. I also want to pivot out to something else if English prompt becomes the main way to develop complex software. Though my other passion is having worse career horizon in the generative AI world (art making). We'll see.

Yes, not too optimistic on the art side when it comes to commercial stuff - if you can generate it cheaply it will be used.

On the hobby side (music) I don't feel the pressure as bad but that's because I don't have any commercial aspirations, it's purely for fun.

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

#600

Post by ozim »

FloorEgg wrote: post #333
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…

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'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 proactively remind them what actually mattered to the business case.*

Gosh I am so tired with that one - someone had a case that burned them in some previous project and now his life mission is to prevent that from happening ever again, and there would be no argument they will take.

Then you get like up to 10 engineers on typical team and team rotation and you end up with all kinds of "we have to do it right because we had to pull all nighter once, 5 years ago" baked in the system.

Not fun part is a lot of business/management people "expect" having perfect solution right away - there are some reasonable ones that understand you need some iteration.

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