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

burkeholland.github.io

821–830 of 1001 posts

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

#821
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…

> If we get effective humanoid robots

That's still an if and also a when; could be 2 decades from now or more till this reliably replaces a nurse.

> Retraining to what exactly?

I wish I had a good solution for all of us and you raise good points , even if you retrain to become say a therapist or a personal trainer the economy could become too broken and fragmented for you to be able to making a living. Governments that can will have to step in.

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

#822
post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to think of Opus as a developer whose job at your company lasts somewhere between 30 to 60 minutes before you fire them and hire a new one. Yes, it's absurd but it's a better metaphor than someone with a chronic long term memory deficit since it fits into the project management framework neatly. So this new developer who is starting today is ready to be assigned their first task, they're very eager to get st…

> You have to think of Opus as a developer whose job at your company lasts somewhere between 30 to 60 minutes before you fire them and hire a new one. I am stealing the heck out of this.

Please go ahead, I'm honoured!

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

#823

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…

The bigger the product, the harder this is.

However, I think the biggest thing is the replacement of products. We are in a place where he talked about replacing two products his wife was using with custom software. I personally have used LLMs to build things that are valuable for me that I just don't have time for otherwise.

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

#824
post #199

I have a different concern: the SOTA products are expensive and get dumbed down on busy times. My personal strategy has been to be a late follower, where I adopt new AI tools when the competition has caught up with the previous SOTA, and now there are many tools that are cost effective and equally good. Can't wait for when the competition catches up with Claude Code, especially the open source/weights Chinese alterna…

If you haven't tried it yet, OpenCode is quite good.

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

#825

I guess the best analogy I can think of is the transition from writing assembly language and the introduction of compilers. Now, (almost) no one knows, or cares, what comes out of the compiler. We just assume it is optimized and that it represents the source code faithfully. Seems like code might go that way too and people will focus on the right prompts and can simply assume the code will be correct.

A compiler is deterministic though.

Does a system being deterministic really matter if it's complex enough you can't predict it? How many stories are there about 'you need to do it in this specific way, and not this other specific way, to get 500x better codegen'?

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

#826

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> it was much easier to complete the fix starting from something 90% working than 0%. As an expert now though, it is genuinely easier and faster to complete the work starting from 0 than to modify something junky. The realplayer example above I could do much faster, correctly, than I could figure out what the AI code was trying to do with all the effects and refactor it correctly. This is why I don't use AI for progr…

Anecdotally I think you're right that the more skilled you are at something, the less utility there is for something that quickly but incompletely takes you from 0 to 90%

But I would generally be skeptical of anybody who claims that all their work is better off starting from 0, the same way I'd be skeptical of someone who claims to not use or need to make google searches about docs/terms/issues as they work.

I'll give you an example of something I understand decently well but get a lot of use out of AI for: bash scripts and unit testing. These are not my core work but they are a large chunk of my work. Without LLMs I would just not write a lot of bash scripts because I found myself constantly looking things up and spending more time than expected getting the script to work across environments / ironing out bugs - I would only write absolutely essential scripts, and generally they'd not be polished enough to check in and share with the team, and just live on my computer in some random location. Now with LLMs I can essentially script in english and get very good bash scripts, so I write a lot more of them and it's easier for me to get them into an acceptable state worth sharing with my team.

Similarly, I really like Golang table tests but hate writing all the cases out and dealing with all the symbols/formatting. Now I can just describe all the different permutations I want and get something that I can lightly edit into being good enough.

I've also found that with domains I am knowledgable enough about, that can translate into being better at going from ~70% to 95% with AI too. In those cases I am not necessarily using AI the same way as someone trying to go from 0->90%: usually they're describing the outcome/goals/features they want relatively informally without knowledge of the known-unknowns and gotchas involved in implementing that. With more knowledge you can prompt LLMs with more implementation/design details and requirements, and course correct away from bad approaches much faster than someone who doesn't know the shape of what they're trying to do. That still comes in handy a lot of the time.

Think about how much time you can save by feeding an API spec/docs into an LLM, telling it create a Go struct for JSON (de)serialization of some monstrous interface like https://docs.cloud.google.com/compute/docs/reference/rest/v1...? Or how much easier it is to upgrade across breaking versions of a language/library when you can just bump the version, note all the places where the old code broke, and have an LLM with an upgrade guide/changelog do all the drudgery of fixing each of the 200 callsites you need to migrate to the next version.

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

#827

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s a bit strange how anecdotes have become acceptable fuel for 1000 comment technical debates. It's a very subjective topic. Some people claim it increases their productivity 100x. Some think it is not fit for purpose. Some think it is dangerous. Some think it's unethical. Weirdly those could all be true at the same time, and where you land on this is purely a matter of importance to the user. > Yet, I’d love to…

How many 1+ hour videos of someone building with AI tools have you sought out and watched? Those definitely exist, it sounds like you didn't go seeking them out or watch them because even with 7 less hours you'd better understand where they add value enough to believe they can help with challenging projects. So why should anybody produce an 8 hour video for you when you wouldn't watch it? Let's be real. You would not…

> In my opinion most of the people who refuse to believe AI can help them while work with software are just incurious/archetypical late adopters.

The biggest blocker I see to having AI help us be more productive is that it transforms how the day to day operations work.

Right now there is some balance in the pipeline of receiving change requests/enhancements, documenting them, estimating implementation time, analyzing cost and benefits, breaking out the feature into discrete stories, having the teams review the stories and 'vote' on a point sizing, planning on when each feature should be completed given the teams current capacity and committing to the releases (PI Planning), and then actually implementing the changes being requested.

However if I can take a code base and enter in a high level feature request from the stakeholders and then hold hands with Kiro to produce a functioning implementation in a day, then the majority of those steps above are just wasting time. Spending a few hundred man-hours to prepare for work that takes a few hundred man-hours might be reasonable, but doing that same prep work for a task that takes 8 man-hours isn't.

And we can't shift to that faster workflow without significant changes to entire software pipeline. The entire PMO team dedicated to reporting when things will be done shifts if that 'thing' is done before the report to the PMO lead is finished being created. Or we need significantly more resources dedicated to planning enhancements so that we could have an actual backlog of work for the developers. But my company appears to neither be interested in shrinking the PMO team nor in expanding the intake staff.

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

#828

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…

who told you that mb of ram is a definition of success?

Opus was out only few months, and it will take time to get this new wave to market. i can assure you my team become way more productive because of opus. not a single developer but an etnire team.

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

#829
post #702

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…

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

#830
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I teach at a university, and spend plenty of time programming for research and for fun. Like many others, I spent some time on the holidays trying to push the current generation of Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex as far as I could. (They're all very good.) I had an idea for something that I wanted, and in five scattered hours, I got it good enough to use. I'm thinking about it in a few different ways: 1. I estimate I…

How do you compare Claude Code to Cursor? I'm a Cursor user quietly watching the CC parade with curiosity. Personally, I haven't been able to give up the IDE experience.

I use CC for so much more than just writing code that I cannot imagine being constrained within an IDE. Why would I want to launch an IDE to have CC update the *arr stack on my NAS to the latest versions for example? Last week I pointed CC at some media files that weren't playing correctly on my Apple TV. It detected what the problem formats were and updated my *arr download rules to prefer other releases and then configured tdarr to re-encode problem files in my existing library.
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