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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

#701

Post by noworriesnate »

ben-gy wrote: post #695

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 u…

Are there a lot of manual steps in managing an xcode project? E.g. does it say "now go into xcode and change this setting" instead of changing the setting directly? Or are you using a tool like xcodegen?

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

#702

Post by g947o »

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 deserves more upvotes.

Even if there is a "fully vibe-coded" product that has real customers, the fact that it's vibe-coded means that others can do the same. Unless you have a secret LLM or some magical prompts that make the code better/more efficient than your competitions, your vibe coded product has no advantage over competition and no moat. What actually matters is everything else -- user experience (which requires hours of meetings and usability studies), integration with own/other people's products, business, marketing, sales etc, much of which you can't vibe code your way to success.

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

#703

Post by bayindirh »

rat9988 wrote: post #681
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.

> Well, the first 90% is easy, the hard part is the second 90%. You'd need to prove that this assertion applies here. I understand that you can't deduce the future gains rate from the past, but you also can't state this as universal truth.

No, I don't need to. Self driving cars is the most recent and biggest example sans LLMs. The saying I have quoted (which has different forms) is valid for programming, construction and even cooking. So it's a simple, well understood baseline.

Knowledge engineering has a notion called "covered/invisible knowledge" which points to the small things we do unknowingly but changes the whole outcome. None of the models (even AI in general) can capture this. We can say it's the essence of being human or the tribal knowledge which makes experienced worker who they are or makes mom's rice taste that good.

Considering these are highly individualized and unique behaviors, a model based on averaging everything can't capture this essence easily if it can ever without extensive fine-tuning for/with that particular person.

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

#704

Post by bayindirh »

literalAardvark wrote: post #696
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.

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_

Are there any recent publications about it so I can refresh myself on the matter?

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

#705

Post by rcarmo »

kgeist wrote: post #603
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…

Well, like I pointed out somewhere else, VS Code gives it a set of prompts and tools that makes it very effective for me. I see that a lot of people are still copy/pasting stuff instead of having the “integrated” experience, and it makes a real difference.

(Cue the “you’re holding it wrong meme” :))

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

#706

Post by llm_nerd »

doxeddaily wrote: post #472
llm_nerd wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"its building it the right way, in an easily understood way, in a way that's easily extensible" I am in a unique situation where I work with a variety of codebases over the week. I have had no problem at all utilizing Claude Code w/ Opus 4.5 and Gemini CLI w/ Gemini 3.0 Pro to make excellent code that is indisputably "the right way", in an extremely clear and understandable way, and that is maximally extensible. None…

I also have >30 years and I've had the same experience. I noticed an immediate improvement with 4.5 and I've been getting great results in general. And yes I do make sure it's not generating crazy architecture. It might do that.. if you let it. So don't let it.

HN has a subset of users -- they're a minority, but they hit threads like this super hard -- who really, truly think that if they say that AI tools suck and are only for nubs loud enough and frequently enough, downvoting anyone who finds them useful, all AI advancements will unwind and it'll be the "good old days" again. It's rather bizarre stuff, but that's what happens when people in denial feel threatened.

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

#707

Post by sanderjd »

yourapostasy wrote: post #388
sksishbs wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s kind of funny - there’s another thread up where a dev claimed a 20-50x speed up. To their credit they posted videos and links to the repo of their work. And when you check the work, a large portion of it was hand rolling an ORM (via an LLM). Relatively solved problem that an LLM would excel at, but also not meaningfully moving the needle when you could use an existing library. And likely just creating more debt…

Reminds me of a post I read a few days ago of someone crowing about an LLM writing for them an email format validator. They did not have the LLM code up an accompanying send-an-email-validation loop, and were blithely kept uninformed by the LLM of the scar tissue built up by experience in the industry on how curiously a deep rabbit hole email validation becomes. If you’ve been around the block and are judicious how y…

Yeah I love working with Claude Code, I agree that the new models are amazing, but I spend a decent amount of time saying "wait, why are we writing that from scratch, haven't we written a library for that, or don't we have examples of using a third party library for it?".

There is probably some effective way to put this direction into the claude.md, but so far it still seems to do unnecessary reimplementation quite a lot.

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

#708

Post by nprateem »

theshrike79 wrote: post #339
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…

> "asking it to fix it." This is what people are still doing wrong. Tools in a loop people, tools in a loop. The agent has to have the tools to detect whatever it just created is producing errors during linting/testing/running. When it can do that, I can loop again, fix the error and again - use the tools to see whether it worked. I _still_ encounter people who think "AI programming" is pasting stuff into ChatGPT on…

Jules is slow incompetent shit and that uses tools in a loop, so no...

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

#709

Post by FiberBundle »

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.

Programming without flow state. Nice.

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

#710

Post by PunchyHamster »

redhale wrote: post #673
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…

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…

Note that blog posts rarely show the 20 other times it failed to build something and only that time that it happened to work.

We've been having same progression with self driving cars and they are also stuck on the last 10% for last 5 years

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