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

burkeholland.github.io

741–750 of 1001 posts

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

#741

Ugh, I'm so sick of these "I can use AI to solve an already solved problem, thus programmers aren't relevant." Note the solved problem part. This isn't convincing except to people that want a (bad) argument to depress wages and lay off workers while making the existing seniors take on more and more work. This is overall bad for the industry.

Aren't most products that actually ship some kind of "solved problem" though?

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

#743

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…

> we have another Claude Code agent that does a full PR review, following a detailed markdown checklist we’ve written for it. (if you know) how is that compared to coderabbit? i'm seriously looking for something better rn...

Never tried coderabbit, just because this is already good enough with Claude Code. It helped us to catch dozens of important issues we wouldn't have caught. We gave some instructions in the CLAUDE.md doc in the repository - with including a nice personalized roast of the engineer that did the review in the intro and conclusion to make it fun! :) Basically, when you do a "create PR" from your Claude Code, it will help you getting your Linear ticket (or creating one if missing), ask you some important questions (like: what tests have you done?), create the PR on Github, request the reviewers, and post a "Auto Review" message with your credentials. It's not an actual review per se but this is enough for our small team.

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

#744
Once again. It is not greenfield projects most of us want to use AI coding assistance for. It is for an existing project, with a byzantine mess of a codebase, and even worse messes of infrastructure, business requirements, regulations, processes, and God knows what else. It seems impossible to me that AI would ever be useful in these contexts (which, again, are practically all I ever deal with as a professional in software development).

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

#745

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…

OK, I am gonna be the guy and put my skin in the game here. I kind of get the hype, but the experience with e.g. Claude Code (or Github Copilot previously and others as weel) has so far been pretty unreliable.

I have Django project with 50 kLOC and it is pretty capable of understanding the architecture, style of coding, naming of variables, functions etc. Sometimes it excels on tasks like "replicate this non-trivial functionality for this other model and update the UI appropriately" and leaves me stunned. Sometimes it solves for me tedious and labourous "replace this markdown editor with something modern, allowing fullscreen edits of content" and does annoying mistake that only visual control shows and is not capable to fix it after 5 prompts. I feel as I am becoming tester more than a developer and I do not like the shift. Especially when I do not like to tell someone he did an obvious mistake and should fix it - it seems I do not care if it is human or AI, I just do not like incompetence I guess.

Yesterday I had to add some parameters to very simple Falcon project and found out it has not been updated for several months and won't build due to some pip issues with pymssql. OK, this is really marginal sub-project so I said - let's migrate it to uv and let's not get hands dirty and let the Claude do it. He did splendidly but in the Dockerfile he missed the "COPY server.py /data/" while I asked him to change the path... Build failed, I updated the path myself and moved on.

And then you listen to very smart guys like Karpathy who rave about Tab, Tab, Tab, while not understanding the language or anything about the code they write. Am I getting this wrong?

I am really far far away from letting agents touch my infrastructure via SSH, access managed databases with full access privileges etc. and dread the day one of my silly customers asks me to give their agent permission to managed services. One might say the liability should then be shifted, but at the end of the day, humans will have to deal with the damage done.

My customer who uses all the codebase I am mentioning here asked me, if there is a way to provide "some AI" with item GTINs and let it generate photos, descriptions, etc. including metadata they handcrafted and extracted for years from various sources. While it looks like nice idea and for them the possibility of decreasing the staff count, I caught the feeling they do not care about the data quality anymore or do not understand the problems the are brining upon them due to errors nobody will catch until it is too late.

TL;DR: I am using Opus 4.5, it helps a lot, I have to keep being (very) cautious. Wake up call 2026? Rather like waking up from hallucination.

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

#746

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…

Why dont I see any streams building apps as quickly as they say? Just HYpe

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

#747

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…

> It's pretty clear to me where this is going. The only question is how long it takes to get there. I don't think its a guarantee. all of the things it can do from that list are greenfield, they just have increasing complexity. The problem comes because even in agentic mode, these models do not (and I would argue, can not) understand code or how it works, they just see patterns and generate a plausible sounding expla…

While I do agree with you. To play the counterpoint advocate though.

What if we get to the point where all software is basically created 'on the fly' as greenfield projects as needed? And you never need to have complex large long lived codebase?

It is probably incredibly wasteful, but ignoring that, could it work?

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

#748
post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBI (from taxing big tech) and retraining. In the U.S they'll have enough money to do this and it will still suck and many people won't recover the extreme loss of status and income (after we've been told our income and status are the most important things in life it's gonna be very hard for people to adapt to the loss of it). Countries like India and Philipines and Ukraine which are basically knowledge support hub w…

Retraining to what exactly? The middle class is being hollowed out globally - so reduced demand for the service economy. If we get effective humanoid robots (seems inevitable) and reliable AI (powered by armies of low payed workers filling in the gaps / taking over whenever the model fails), I'm not sure how much of an economy we could have for 'retraining' into. There are only so many onlyfans subscriptions / patron…

Health care, elder care, child care are all chronically short of willing, able bodies.

Most people want to do anything but these three things - society is in many a ways a competition for who gets to avoid them. AI is a way of inexorably boxing people back into actually doing them.

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

#749
post #734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So? Getting a months' worth of junior level code in an hour is still unbelievable.

Whats the improvement here? I spend more time fixing it then doing it myself anyways. And I have less confidence in the code Opus generates

[deleted]

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

#750
post #734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So? Getting a months' worth of junior level code in an hour is still unbelievable.

Whats the improvement here? I spend more time fixing it then doing it myself anyways. And I have less confidence in the code Opus generates

What are you fixing?
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