Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

burkeholland.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

691–700 of 1001 posts

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

#691

Post by sanderjd »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #437
FloorEgg wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 know what you are talking about, but there is more to life than just product-market fit. Hardly any of us are working on Postgres, Photoshop, blender, etc. but it's not just cope to wish we were. It's good to think about the needs to business and the needs of society separately. Yes, the thing needs users, or no one is benefiting. But it also needs to do good for those users, and ultimately, at the highest caliber,…

> I'm hoping for a world where more end users code (vibe or otherwise) and the solve their own problems with their own software. I think that will make more a smaller, more elite software industry that is more focused on infrastructure than last-mile value capture.

Yes! This is what I'm excited about as well. Though I'm genuinely ambivalent about what I want my role to be. Sometimes I'm excited about figuring out how I can work on the infrastructure side. That would be more similar to what I've done in my career thus far. But a lot of the time, I think that what I'd prefer would be to become one of those end users with my own domain-specific problems in some niche that I'm building my own software to help myself with. That sounds pretty great! But it might be a pretty unnatural or even painful change for a lot of us who have been focused for so long on building software tools for other people to use.

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

#692

Post by bayindirh »

throwthrowuknow wrote: post #688
bayindirh wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the first 90% is easy, the hard part is the second 90%. Case in point: Self driving cars. Also, consider that we need to pirate the whole internet to be able to do this, so these models are not creative. They are just directed blenders.

Even if Opus 4.5 is the limit it’s still a massively useful tool. I don’t believe it’s the limit though for the simple fact that a lot could be done by creating more specialized models for each subdomain i.e. they’ve focused mostly on web based development but could do the same for any other paradigm.

Personally I'm not against LLMs or AI itself, but considering how these models are built and trained, I personally refuse to use tools built on others' work without or against their consent (esp. GPL/LGPL/AGPL, Non Commercial / No Derivatives CC licenses and Source Available licenses).

Of course the tech will be useful and ethical if these problems are solved or decided to be solved the right way.

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

#693

Post by lomase »

hnfong wrote: post #525
BobbyJo wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up until now, no business has been built on tools and technology that no one understands. I expect that will continue. Given that, I expect that, even if AI is writing all of the code, we will still need people around who understand it. If AI can create and operate your entire business, your moat is nil. So, you not hiring software engineers does not matter, because you do not have a business.

> Up until now, no business has been built on tools and technology that no one understands. I expect that will continue. Big claims here. Did brewers and bakers up to the middle ages understand fermentation and how yeasts work?

They at least understood that it was something deterministic that they could reproduce.

That puts them ahead of the LLM crowd.

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

#694

Post by zingar »

cryptica wrote: post #649
nine_k wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like magical thinking. For one, there are objectively detrimental ways to organize code: tight coupling, lots of mutable shared state, etc. No matter who or what reads or writes the code, such code is more error-prone, and more brittle to handle. Then, abstractions are tools to lower the cognitive load. Good abstractions reduce the total amount of code written, allow to reason about the code in terms of t…

Yes LLMs aren't very good at architecture. I suspect because the average project online has pretty bad architecture. The training set is poisoned. It's kind of bittersweet for me because I was dreaming of becoming a software architect when I graduated university and the role started disappearing so I never actually became one! But the upside of this is that now LLMs suck at software architecture... Maybe companies wi…

Refactoring is a very mechanistic way of turning bad code into good. I don’t see a world in which our tools (LLMs or otherwise) don’t learn this.

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

#695

Post by ben-gy »

I second this article - I built twelve iOS/Mac apps in two weeks with Opus 4.5 - four of them are already in the App Store - I’m a Rails Engineer and never had the time to learn Swift but man does Opus 4.5 make that not even matter - it even handles entitlements, logo & splash screen generation, refactors to remove dead code, edge case assent and hardening, Multiplatform app design, and more - I’m yet to run into a use case it can’t handle for most general use cases - that said, I have found some common mistakes it makes (by common I mean almost every time); puts iOS line list line items in buttons making them blue when they should not be, doesn’t set defaults for new data structure variables which crashes the app when changing the data structure after the fact, design consistent after the first shot (minor things like white background instead of grey background like all the other screens already, etc) - the one thing that i know it cant do well (and no other model that I know of can do this well either) is ASTM bi-directional communications (we work with pathology analysers that use this 1995 frame-based communication standard), even when you load it up with the spec and supporting docs - I suspect this is due to a dirty of available codebases that tackle this problem due to its niche and generally proprietary nature…

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

#696

Post by literalAardvark »

bayindirh wrote: post #677
redhale wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily responding to you directly, but I find this take to be interesting, and I see it every time an article like this makes the rounds. Starting back in 2022/2023: - (~2022) It can auto-complete one line, but it can't write a full function. - (~2023) Ok, it can write a full function, but it can't write a full feature. - (~2024) Ok, it can write a full feature, but it can't write a simple application. - (~2…

Well, the first 90% is easy, the hard part is the second 90%. Case in point: Self driving cars. Also, consider that we need to pirate the whole internet to be able to do this, so these models are not creative. They are just directed blenders.

They're not blenders.

This is clear from the fact that you can distill the logic ability from a 700b parameter model into a 14b model and maintain almost all of it.

You just lose knowledge, which can be provided externally, and which is the actual "pirated" part.

The logic is _learned_

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

#697

Post by lomase »

pillefitz wrote: post #468
BobbyJo wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up until now, no business has been built on tools and technology that no one understands. I expect that will continue. Given that, I expect that, even if AI is writing all of the code, we will still need people around who understand it. If AI can create and operate your entire business, your moat is nil. So, you not hiring software engineers does not matter, because you do not have a business.

Most legacy apps are barely understood by anyone, and yet continue to generate value and and are (somehow) kept alive.

Many here have been doing the "understanding of legacy code" as a job +50 years.

This "legacy apps are barely understood by anybody", is just somnething you made up.

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

#698

Post by lunias »

hollowturtle wrote: post #641

I'm tired of constantly debating the same thing again and again. Where are the products? Where is some great performing software all LLM/agent crafted? All I see is software bloatness and decline. Where is Discord that uses just a bunch of hundreds megs of ram? Where is unbloated faster Slack? Where is the Excel killer? Fast mobile apps? Browsers and the web platform improved? Why Cursor team don't use Cursor to get…

This is true. I think most people are mostly using AI at work to fix bugs in existing codebases. A smaller group of people are benchmarking AI by giving it ideas for apps that no one needs and seeing if it can get close. The smallest group of people is actually designing new software and asking the AI to iterate on it.

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

#699

Post by KentLatricia »

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 these posts assume is a single developer keep working on the product with a number of AI agents, not a large team. I think we need to rethink how teams work with AI. Its probably not gonna be a single developer typing a prompt but a team somehow collaborates a prompt or equivalent. XP on steroids? Programming by committee?

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

#700

Post by keybored »

maciejzj wrote: post #604

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 happ…

It’s a class war where one side is publicly, openly, without reservation stating their intent to make people’s skillset built up through decades unemployable (those exact skillsets; may get some other work). The other side, meanwhile, are divided between some camps like the hardline skeptics, the people following the LLM evangelists, the one-man startup-with-LLM crowd, and the people worrying about the societal ramifications.

In other words. Only one side is even fighting the war. The other one is either cheering on the tsunami on or fretting about how their beachside house will get wrecked without making any effort to save themselves.

This is the sort of collective agency that even hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual wages/other compensation in American tech hubs gets us. Pathetic.

Post reply on HN