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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

#601

Post by rdos »

kypro wrote: post #310

It's been interesting watching HN shift in my direction on this in recent weeks... I had been saying since around summer of this year that coding agents were getting extremely good. The base model improvements were ok, but the agentic coding wrappers were basically game changers if you were using them right. Until recently they still felt very context limited, but the context problem increasingly feels like a solved…

LLM's are good at making stuff from scratch and perfect when you don't have to worry about the codes future. 'Research' can be a great tool. But LLMs are horrible in big codebases and multiple micro services. Also at making decision, never let it make a decision for you. You need to know what's happening and you can't ship straight AI code. It can save time, but it's not a lot and it won't replace anyone.

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

#602

Post by [deleted] »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #54
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 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…

[deleted]

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

#603

Post by kgeist »

rcarmo wrote: post #205

I had a similar set of experiences with GPT 5.x over the holiday break, across somewhat more disparate domains: https://taoofmac.com/space/notes/2025/12/31/1830 I hacked together a Swift tool to replace a Python automation I had, merged an ARM JIT engine into a 68k emulator, and even got a very decent start on a synth project I’ve been meaning to do for years. What has become immensely apparent to me is that even gpt…

I tried generating code with ChatGPT 5.2, but the results weren't that great:

1) It often overcomplicates things for me. After I refactor its code, it's usually half the size and much more readable. It often adds unnecessary checks or mini-features 'just in case' that I don't need.

2) On the other hand, almost every function it produces has at least one bug or ignores at least one instruction. However, if I ask it to review its own code several times, it eventually finds the bugs.

I still find it very useful, just not as a standalone programming agent. My workflow is that ChatGPT gives me a rough blueprint and I iterate on it myself, I find this faster and less error-prone. It's usually most useful in areas where I'm not an expert, such as when I don't remember exact APIs. In areas where I can immediately picture the entire implementation in my head, it's usually faster and more reliable to write the code myself.

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

#604

Post by maciejzj »

I've been on a small adventure of posting more actively on HN since the release of Gemini 3, trying to stir debate around the more “societal” aspects of what's going on with AI.

Regardless of how much you value Cloud Code technically, there is no denying that it has/will have huge impact. If technology knowledge and development are commoditised and distributed via subscription, huge societal changes are going to happen. Image what will happen to Ireland if Accenture dissolves, or what will happen to the millions of Indians when IT outsourcing becomes economically irrelevant. Will Seattle become new Detroit after Microsoft automates Windows maintenance? What about the hairdressers, cooks, lawyers, etc. who provided services for IT labourers/companies in California?

Lot of people here (especially Anthropic-adjacent) like to extrapolate the trends and draw conclusions up to the point when they say that white-collar labourers will not be needed anymore. I would like these people to have courage to take this one step further and connect this resolution with the housing crisis, loneliness epidemic, college debts, and job market crisis for people under 30.

It feels like we are diving head first into societal crisis of unparalleled scale and the people behind the steering wheel are excited to push the accelerator pedal even more.

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

#605

Post by jarjoura »

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…

I've also found it to keep such a constrained context window (on large codebases), that it writes a secondary block of code that already had a solution in a different area of the same file.

Nothing I do seems to fix that in its initial code writing steps. Only after it finishes, when I've asked it to go back and rewrite the changes, this time making only 2 or 3 lines of code, does it magically (or finally) find the other implementation and reuse it.

It's freakin incredible at tracing through code and figuring it out. I <3 Opus. However, it's still quite far from any kind of set-and-forget-it.

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

#606

Post by friendzis »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #571
friendzis wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As long as your program is large and multi-threaded (most programs that matter commercially), it is not very analyzable or repeatable. You replace those qualities with QA and tests, the same is true with prompting.

Eve if "write code -> run QA -> analyze failures -> rewrite code" is cheaper for most commercial software than thorough upfront formal verification, it works precisely because the programs are analyzable.

When the code spit out by an LLM does not pass QA one can merely add "pls fix teh program, bro, pls no mistakes this time, bro, kthxbye", cross their fingers and hope for the best, because in the end it is impossible -- fundamentally -- to determine which part of the prompt produced offending code.

While it is indeed an interesting observation that the latter approaches commercial viability in certain areas there is still somewhere between zero and infinitesimal overlap between prompting and engineering.

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

#608

Post by moffkalast »

wiml wrote: post #279
6177c40f wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're entering a world where programmers as such won't really exist (except perhaps in certain niches). Being able to program (and read code, in particular) will probably remain useful, though diminished in value. What will matter more is your ability to actually create things, using whatever tools are necessary and available, and have them actually be useful. Which, in a way, is the same as it ever was. Ther…

We've been living in that world since the invention of the compiler ("automatic programming"). Few people write machine code any more. If you think of LLMs as a new variety of compiler, a lot of their shortcomings are easier to describe.

Finally we've invented a compiler that we can yell at when it gives bullshit errors. I really missed that with gcc.

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

#609

Post by scotty79 »

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…

If you have microservices architecture in your project you are set for AI. You can swap out any lacking, legacy microservice in your system with "greenfield" vibecoded one.

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

#610

Post by Balinares »

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…

Exactly. The main issue IMO is that "software that seems to work" and "software that works" can be very hard to tell apart without validating the code, yet these are drastically different in terms of long-term outcomes. Especially when there's a lot of money, or even lives, riding on these outcomes. Just because LLMs can write software to run the Therac-25 doesn't mean it's acceptable for them to do so.

Your hobby project, though, knock yourself out.

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