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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

#711

Post by sanderjd »

whynotminot wrote: post #416
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…

> 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.

This is the question! Your narrative is definitely plausible, and I won't be shocked if it turns out this way. But it still isn't my expectation. It wasn't when people were saying this in 2023 or in 2024, and I haven't been wrong yet. It does seem more likely to me now than it did a couple years ago, but still not the likeliest outcome in the next few years.

But nobody knows for sure!

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

#712

Post by PunchyHamster »

estimator7292 wrote: post #345
whatever1 wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their thesis is that code quality does not matter as it is now a cheap commodity. As long as it passes the tests today it's great. If we need to refactor the whole goddamn app tomorrow, no problem, we will just pay up the credits and do it in a few hours.

The fundamental assumption is completely wrong. Code is not a cheap commodity. It is in fact so disastrously expensive that the entire US economy is about to implode while we're unbolting jet engines from old planes to fire up in the parking lots of datacenters for electricity.

Now that entirely depends on app. A lot of software industry is popping out and maintaining relatively simple apps with small differences and customizations per client.

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

#713

Post by simonw »

Krei-se wrote: post #581
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.

Are you honestly saying that building a new spec-compliant WebAssembly runtime from scratch isn't an absurdly difficult project?

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

#714

Post by PunchyHamster »

whatever1 wrote: post #329
multisport wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes agreed, and tbh even if that thesis is wrong, what does it matter?

The whole point of good engineering was not about just hitting the hard specs, but also have extendable, readable, maintainable code. But if today it’s so cheap to generate new code that meets updated specs, why care about the quality of the code itself? Maybe the engineering work today is to review specs and tests and let LLMs do whatever behind the scenes to hit the specs. If the specs change, just start from scrat…

It's all fine till money starts being involved and whoopsies cost more than few hours of fixing.

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

#715

Post by PunchyHamster »

parpfish wrote: post #445
kaashif wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is a subjective difference. When a human builds dogshit at least you know they put some effort and the hours in. When I'm reading piles of LLM slop, I know that just reading it is already more effort than it took to write. It feels like I'm being played. This is entirely subjective and emotional. But when someone writes something with an LLM in 5 seconds and asks me to spend hours reviewing...fuck off.

If you are heavily using LLMs, you need to change the way you think about reviews I think most people now approach it as: Dev0 uses an LLM to build a feature super fast, Dev1 spends time doing a in depth review. Dev0 built it, Dev1 reviewed it. And Dev0 is happy because they used the tool to save time! But what should happen is that Dev0 should take all that time they saved coding and reallocate it to the in depth re…

Can't do that, else KPIs won't show that AI tools reduced amount of coding work by xx%

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

#716

Post by simonw »

Loocid wrote: post #439
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!

I'm not super surprised that these examples worked well. They are complex and a ton of work, but the problems are relatively well defined with tons of documentation online. Sounds ideal for an LLM no?

Yes, that's a point I've been trying to emphasize: if a problem is well specified a coding agent can crunch for hours on it to get to a solution.

Even better if there's an existing conformance suite to point at - like html5lib-tests or the WenAssembly spec tests.

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

#717

Post by kubb »

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…

Each of these years we’ve had a claim that it’s about to replace all engineers.

By your logic, does it mean that engineers will never get replaced?

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

#718

Post by miki123211 »

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…

In my personal experience, Claude is better at greenfield, Codex is better at fitting in. Claude is the perfect tool for a "vibe coder", Codex is for the serious engineer who wants to get great and real work done.

Codex will regularly give me 1000+ line diffs where all my comments (I review every single line of what agents write) are basically nitpicks. "Make this shallow w/ early return, use | None instead of Optional", that sort of thing.

I do prompt it in detail though. It feels like I'm the person coming in with the architecture most of the time, AI "draws the rest of the owl."

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

#719

Post by whynotminot »

sanderjd wrote: post #711
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.

This is the question! Your narrative is definitely plausible, and I won't be shocked if it turns out this way. But it still isn't my expectation. It wasn't when people were saying this in 2023 or in 2024, and I haven't been wrong yet. It does seem more likely to me now than it did a couple years ago, but still not the likeliest outcome in the next few years. But nobody knows for sure!

Yeah, I might be early to this. And certainly, I still read a lot of code in my day to day right now.

But I sure write a lot less of it, and the percentage I write continues to go down with every new model release. And if I'm no longer writing it, and the person who works on it after me isn't writing it either, it changes the whole art of software engineering.

I used to spend a great deal of time with already working code that I had written thinking about how to rewrite it better, so that the person after me would have a good clean idea of what is going on.

But humans aren't working in the repos as much now. I think it's just a matter of time before the models are writing code essentially for their eyes, their affordances -- not ours.

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