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

burkeholland.github.io

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

#751

Post by 3D30497420 »

klaussilveira wrote: post #325
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 made a similar comment on a different thread, but I think it also fits here: I think the disconnect between engineers is due to their own context. If you work with frontend applications, specially React/React Native/HTML/Mobile, your experience with LLMs is completely different than the experience of someone working with OpenGL, io_uring, libev and other lower level stuff. Sure, Opus 4.5 can one shot Windows utilit…

I'll second this. I'm making a fairly basic iOS/Swift app with an accompanying React-based site. I was able to vibe-code the React site (it isn't pretty, but it works and the code is fairly decent). But I've struggled to get the Swift code to be reliable.

Which makes sense. I'm sure there's lots of training data for React/HTML/CSS/etc. but much less with Swift, especially the newer versions.

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

#752

Post by ammut »

danfritz wrote: post #733

Every time I see a post like this on HN I try again and every time I come to the same conclusion. I have never see one agent managing to pull something off that I could instantly ship. It still ends up being very junior code. I just tried again and ask Opus to add custom video controls around ReactPlayer. I started in Plan mode which looked overal good (used our styling libs, existing components, icons and so on). I…

I've spent quite a bit of time with Codex recently and come to the conclusion that you can't simply say "Let's add custom video controls around ReactPlayer." You need to follow up with a set of strict requirements to set expectations, guard rails, and what the final product should do (and not do). Even then it may have a few issues, but continuing to prompt with clearly stated problems that don't meet the requirements (or you forgot to include) usually clears it up.

Code that would have taken me a week to write is done in about 10 minutes. It's likely on average better than what I could personally write as a novice-mid level programmer.

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

#753

Post by jwblackwell »

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…

With all due respect somebody could launch a version of Discord that's 10x faster tomorrow and nobody would know about it

It's very difficult to unseat those incumbents, especially those with strong network effects.

Plus the people that work in those larger companies are not at the edge of AI coding at all and not motivated to rock the boat

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

#754

Post by animanoir »

danfritz wrote: post #733

Every time I see a post like this on HN I try again and every time I come to the same conclusion. I have never see one agent managing to pull something off that I could instantly ship. It still ends up being very junior code. I just tried again and ask Opus to add custom video controls around ReactPlayer. I started in Plan mode which looked overal good (used our styling libs, existing components, icons and so on). I…

[dead]

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

#755

Post by vladsh »

It’s a bit strange how anecdotes have become acceptable fuel for 1000 comment technical debates.

I’ve always liked the quote that sufficiently advanced tech looks like magic, but its mistake to assume that things that look like magic also share other properties of magic. They don’t.

Software engineering spans over several distinct skills: forming logical plans, encoding them in machine executable form(coding), making them readable and expandable by other humans(to scale engineering), and constantly navigating tradeoffs like performance, maintainability and org constraints as requirements evolve.

LLMs are very good at some of these, especially instruction following within well known methodologies. That’s real progress, and it will be productized sooner than later, having concrete usecases, ROI and clearly defined end user.

Yet, I’d love to see less discussion driven by anecdotes and more discussion about productizing these tools, where they work, usage methodologies, missing tooling, KPIs for specific usecases. And don’t get me started on current evaluation frameworks, they become increasingly irrelevant once models are good enough at instruction following.

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

#756

Post by sanderjd »

whynotminot wrote: post #719
sanderjd wrote: post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah we're not too far from agreement here.

Something I think though (which, again, I could very well be wrong about; uncertainty is the only certainly right now) is that "so the person after me would have a good clean idea of what is going on" is also going to continue mattering even when that "person" is often an AI. It might be different, clarity might mean something totally different for AIs than for humans, but right now I think a good expectation is that clarity to humans is also useful to AIs. So at the moment I still spend time coaxing the AI to write things clearly.

That could turn out to be wasted time, but who knows. I also think if it as a hedge against the risk that we hit some point where the AIs turn out to be bad at maintaining their own crap, at which point it would be good for me to be able to understand and work with what has been written!

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

#757

Post by danfritz »

ammut wrote: post #752
danfritz wrote: post #733

Every time I see a post like this on HN I try again and every time I come to the same conclusion. I have never see one agent managing to pull something off that I could instantly ship. It still ends up being very junior code. I just tried again and ask Opus to add custom video controls around ReactPlayer. I started in Plan mode which looked overal good (used our styling libs, existing components, icons and so on). I…

I've spent quite a bit of time with Codex recently and come to the conclusion that you can't simply say "Let's add custom video controls around ReactPlayer." You need to follow up with a set of strict requirements to set expectations, guard rails, and what the final product should do (and not do). Even then it may have a few issues, but continuing to prompt with clearly stated problems that don't meet the requirement…

By the time I have figured out all those quirks and guardrails I could have done it myself in 45min tops.

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

#758

Post by hollowturtle »

jwblackwell wrote: post #753
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…

With all due respect somebody could launch a version of Discord that's 10x faster tomorrow and nobody would know about it It's very difficult to unseat those incumbents, especially those with strong network effects. Plus the people that work in those larger companies are not at the edge of AI coding at all and not motivated to rock the boat

Totally disagree. One example is Zed which is very well known and it's faster than any other editor, wasn't built with AI though.

> People on larger companies are not at the edge of AI coding

False Microsoft is all in with Copilot, and I can't believe the company that created Copilot doesn't use it internally, I'd rather say they should be the ones that would know how to master it! Yet no better vscode, still bloated teams etc etc

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

#759

Post by gejose »

danfritz wrote: post #733

Every time I see a post like this on HN I try again and every time I come to the same conclusion. I have never see one agent managing to pull something off that I could instantly ship. It still ends up being very junior code. I just tried again and ask Opus to add custom video controls around ReactPlayer. I started in Plan mode which looked overal good (used our styling libs, existing components, icons and so on). I…

I used to run into this quite a bit until I added an explicit instruction in CLAUDE.md to the effect of:

> Be thoughtful when using `useEffect`. Read docs at https://react.dev/learn/you-might-not-need-an-effect to understand if you really need an effect

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

#760

Post by enraged_camel »

danfritz wrote: post #733

Every time I see a post like this on HN I try again and every time I come to the same conclusion. I have never see one agent managing to pull something off that I could instantly ship. It still ends up being very junior code. I just tried again and ask Opus to add custom video controls around ReactPlayer. I started in Plan mode which looked overal good (used our styling libs, existing components, icons and so on). I…

I find anecdotes like yours bewildering, because I've been using Opus with Vue.js and it crushes everything I throw at it. The amount of corrections I need to make tend to be minimal, and mostly cosmetic.

The tasks I give it are not trivial either. Just yesterday I had it create a full-blown WYSIWYG editor for authoring the content we serve through our app. This is something that would have taken me two weeks, give or take. Opus looked at the content definitions on the server, queried the database for examples, then started writing code and finished it in ~15 minutes, and after another 15-20 minutes of further prompting for refinement, it was ready to ship.

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