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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

#791

Post by throwup238 »

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…

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

Not according to a Zed team member, in these very comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46522437

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

#792

Post by [deleted] »

g947o wrote: post #702
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…

[deleted]

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

#793

Post by PaulHoule »

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…

I did a lot of analysis and biz dev work on the "Excel killer" and came to the conclusion that it would be hard to get people to pay for.

For one thing most enterprises and many individuals have an Office 365 subscription to access Office programs which are less offensive than Excel so they aren't going to save any money by dropping Excel.

On top of it the "killer" would probably not be one product aimed at one market but maybe a few different things. Some people could use "visual pandas" for instance, something that today would be LLM-infused. Other people could use a no-code builder for calculations. The kind of person who is doing muddled and confused work with Excel wouldn't know which "killer" they needed or understand why decimal math would mean they always cut checks in the right amount.

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

#794

Post by gck1 »

mikestorrent wrote: post #218
ryandrake wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was me. I was a huge AI coding detractor on here for a while (you can check my comment history). But, in order to stay informed and not just be that grouchy curmudgeon all the time, I kept up with the models and regularly tried them out. Opus 4.5 is so much better than anything I've tried before, I'm ready to change my mind about AI assistance. I even gave -True Vibe Coding- a whirl. Yesterday, from a blank dire…

I have a few Go projects now and I speak Go as well as you speak Kotlin. I predict that we'll see some languages really pull ahead of others in the next few years based on their advantages for AI-powered development. For instance, I always respected types, but I'm too lazy to go spend hours working on types when I can just do ruby-style duck typing and get a long ways before the inevitable problems rear their head. N…

> I predict that we'll see some languages really pull ahead of others in the next few years based on their advantages for AI-powered development.

Oh absolutely. I've been using Python for past 15 or so years for everything.

I've never written a single line of Rust in my life, and all my new projects are Rust now, even the quick-script-throwaway things, because it's so much better at instantly screaming at claude when it goes off track. It may take it longer to finish what I asked it to do, but requires so much less involvement from me.

I will likely never start another new project in python ever.

EDIT: Forgot to add that paired with a good linter, this is even more impressive. I told Claude to come up with the most masochistic clippy configuration possible, where even a tiny mistake is instantly punished and exceptions have to be truly exceptional (I have another agent that verifies this each run).

I just wish there was cargo-clippy for enforcing architectural patterns.

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

#795

Post by broken_ceiling »

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 argument falls a little flat when you consider how much software may or may not be written inside one's own personal work flow, or to scale that up, inside a small business. The idea that a small business doing >1mil revenue can now hire a dev or two, and build out a fairly functional domain-driven system should not be understated. The democratization of software, and the lowering of the barriers to entry to basic CRUD apps, may not necessarily show up in a TAM report... Do you need a killer app that treads into unicorn territory to prove it's impact? What about a million apps that displace said unicorn potentials by removing the need for a COTS?

Oh, and remember, the iPhone was revolutionary but it was diffused so slowly into the greater economy, the impact on global GDP was basically negligent. Actually, almost all the perceived grandiose tech jumps did not magically produce huge GDP gains overnight.

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

#796

Post by Forgeties79 »

weitendorf wrote: post #777
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…

Back in the day when you found a solution to your problem on Stackoverflow, you typically had to make some minor changes and perhaps engage in some critical thinking to integrate it into your code base. It was still worth looking for those answers, though, because it was much easier to complete the fix starting from something 90% working than 0%. The first few times in your career you found answers that solved your p…

The difference is you’re generally retooling for your purpose rather than scouring for multiple, easily avoidable screw ups that if overlooked will cause massive headaches later on.

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

#797

Post by PaulHoule »

I'll argue many of his cases are things that are straightforward except for the boilerplate that surrounds them which are often emotionally difficult or prone to rabbit holes.

Like that first one where he writes a right-click handler, off the top of my head I have no idea how I would do that, I could see it taking a few hours to just set up a dev environment, and I would probably overthink the research. I was working on something where Junie suggested I write a browser extension for Firefox and I was initially intimidated at the thought but it banged out something in just a few minutes that basically worked after the second prompt.

Similarly the Facebook autoposter is completely straightforward to code but it can be so emotionally exhausting to fight with authentication APIs, a big part of the coding agent story isn't just that it saves you time but that they can be strong when you are emotionally weak.

The one which seems the hardest is the one that does the routing and travel time estimation which I'd imagine is calling out to some API or library. I used to work at a place that did sales territory optimization and we had one product that would help work out routes for sales and service people who travel from customer to customer and we had a specialist code that stuff in C++ and he had a very different viewpoint than me, he was good at what he did and could get that kind of code to run fast but I wouldn't have trusted him to even look at applications code.

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

#798

Post by quest88 »

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…

Anecdotally I had Gemini convert a simple react native app to swift in two prompts. If it's that simple then maybe we will see less of the chromium desktop apps

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

#799

Post by kachapopopow »

edg5000 wrote: post #684
kachapopopow wrote: post #19

It's also the feeling I have, opus is not a ground-breaking model by any means. However, Opus 4.5 is incredible when you give it everything it needs, a direction, what you have versus what you want and it will make it work, really, it will work. The code might me ugly, undesirable, would only work for that one condition, but with futher prompting you can evolve it and produce something that you can be proud of. Opus…

Opus can produce beatiful code. It can outcode a good programmer. But getting it to do this reliably is something I've gotten better at over the last year; it's a skill that took quite a bit of practice. I now write very long specifications and this helps. I haven't figured out a bulletproof workflow, I think that will take years. But I often get just amazing code out of it.

there is a big difference between a good programmer and a programmer that gives a shit so I disagree, opus can not come close to the code quality that someone can create and at that point it is the person behind the wheel that is causing the good quality to manifest rather than the AI randomly stumbling upon it.

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

#800

Post by ugurs »

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…

Ok, it can create a long-lived complex codebase for a product that is extensible and scalable over the long term, but it doesn't have cool tattoos and can't fancy a matcha
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