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

761–770 of 1001 posts

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

#761

Post by lucianbr »

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…

It sounds like it takes you at least 10 minutes to just write the prompt with all the details you mentioned. Especially if you need to continue and prompt again (and again?).

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

#762

Post by hasmolo »

danfritz wrote: post #735
jf22 wrote: 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

i’ve become convinced that the devs that talk about having to fix the code are the same ones that would make incredibly poor managers. when you manage a team you need to be focused on the effect of the code not the small details.

this sort of developer in a pair programming exercise would find themselves flustered at how a junior approached problem solving and just fix it themselves. i strongly suspect the loss of a feeling of control is at play here.

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

#763

Post by weitendorf »

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…

Except for maybe an "Excel killer", all those things you listed are not things people are willing to pay for. Also agents are bad at that kind of work (most devs are bad at that stuff, it's why it was something people whined about even before agents).

And funnily enough there are products and tools that are essentially less bloated slack/discord. Have you heard of https://stoat.chat/ (aka revolt) or https://pumble.com/ or https://meet.jit.si/? If not I would guess it's for one of two reasons: not caring enough about these problems to even go looking for them yourself, or their lack of "bloatedness" resulting in them not being a mature/fully featured enough product to be worth marketing or adopting.

If you'd like to see a product mostly made with agents/for agents you can check out mine at https://statue.dev/ - we're making a static site generator with a templating and component system paired with user-story driven "agentic workflows" (~blueprints/playbooks for common user actions like "I need to add a new page and list it on the navbar" or "create a site from the developer portfolio template personalized for my github").

I would guess most other projects are probably in a similar situation as we are: agentic developer tools have only really been good enough to heavily use/build products around for a few months, so it's a typical few-month-old project. But agents definitely made it easier to build.

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

#764

Post by josu »

dajoh wrote: post #596
josu wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So my verdict is that it's great for code analysis, and it's fantastic for injecting some book knowledge on complex topics into your programming, but it can't tackle those complex problems by itself. I don't think you've seen the full potential. I'm currently #1 on 5 different very complex computer engineering problems, and I can't even write a "hello world" in rust or cpp. You no longer need to know how to write co…

>I'm currently #1 on 5 different very complex computer engineering problems Ah yes, well known very complex computer engineering problems such as: * Parsing JSON objects, summing a single field * Matrix multiplication * Parsing and evaluating integer basic arithmetic expressions And you're telling me all you needed to do to get the best solution in the world to these problems was talk to an LLM?

Lol, the problem is not finding a solution, the problem is solving it in the most efficient way.

If you think you can beat an LLM, the leaderboard is right there.

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

#765

Post by mnky9800n »

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 always assume the person either didn't use coding agents in a while or its their first time. don't get me wrong, i love claude code, but my students are still better at getting stuff done that i can just approve and not micromanage. thats what i think everyone is missing from their commentary. you have to micromanage a coding agent. you don't have to micromanage a good student. when you dont need to micromanage anymore at all, that's when the floor falls out and everyone has a team of agents doing whatever they want to make them all billionaires or whatever it is AI is promising to do those days.

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

#766

Post by fenwick67 »

melagonster wrote: post #501
fenwick67 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another thing that gets me with projects like this, there are already many examples of image converters, minesweeper clones etc that you can just fork on GitHub, the value of the LLM here is largely just stripping the copyright off

- I cloned a project from GitHub and made some minor modifications. - I used AI-assisted programming to create a project. Even if the content is identical, or if the AI is smart enough to replicate the project by itself, the latter can be included on a CV.

Do people really see a CV and read "computer mommy made me a program" and think it's impressive

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

#767

Post by twak »

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

you can build it and simply use it in your own office? There is no need to shout about it if the cost of writing software goes to zero (but the value remains non-zero!).

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

#768

Post by PretzelPirate »

hollowturtle wrote: post #758
jwblackwell wrote: post #753

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Yet no better vscode, still bloated teams etc etc

Why do you assume that Microsoft would focus on building a better (to you) VSCode or less bloated Teams?

I assume they'd use Github Copilot to make a more profitable VSCode and Teams, which doesn't require focusing on speed and bloat.

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

#769

Post by hollowturtle »

weitendorf wrote: post #763
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…

Except for maybe an "Excel killer", all those things you listed are not things people are willing to pay for. Also agents are bad at that kind of work (most devs are bad at that stuff, it's why it was something people whined about even before agents). And funnily enough there are products and tools that are essentially less bloated slack/discord. Have you heard of https://stoat.chat/ (aka revolt) or https://pumble.co…

Not willing to pay for? How can you be sure? For example explain then why many gamers are ditching Windows for Linux and buying hardware from Valve... There must be a reason. Every person I talked to that uses Excel hate how slow it is, same for teams and many other products. Finally, were the mentioned products built with vibe coding?

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

#770

Post by Gud »

lucianbr wrote: post #761
ammut wrote: post #752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It sounds like it takes you at least 10 minutes to just write the prompt with all the details you mentioned. Especially if you need to continue and prompt again (and again?).

I mean, I typically do a lot more thinking than 10 minutes.

I’m writing some (for me) seriously advanced software that would have taken me months to write, in weeks, using Claude and ChatGPT.

It’s even unlikely I would be able to pull it off myself after a long days work.

The LLM doesn’t replace. It works in parallel.

Post reply on HN