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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

#831

Post by qingcharles »

lomase wrote: post #590
qingcharles wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had Opus write a whole app for me in 30 seconds the other night. I use a very extensive AGENTS.md to guide AI in how I like my code chiseled. I've been happily running the app without looking at a line of it, but I was discussing the app with someone today, so I popped the code open to see what it looked like. Perfect. 10/10 in every way. I would not have written it that good. It came up with at least one idea I wo…

Can you show us that amazing 10/10 app?

It's a not very exciting C# command-line app that takes a PDF and emits it as a sprite sheet with a text file of all the pixel positions of each page :)

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

#832

Post by hu3 »

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…

Yep. It sucks. People are delusional. Let's ignore LLMs and carry on...

On a more serious note:

1) Split tasks into smaller tasks just like a human would do

Would you bash your keyboard for an hour, adding all video controls at once before even testing if anything works at all? Ofc not. You would start by adding a slider and test it until you are satisfied. Then move to next video control. An so on. LLMs are the same. Sometimes they can one-shot many related changes in a single prompt but the common reality is what you experienced: it works sometimes but the code is suboptimal.

2) Document desireable and undesireable coding patterns in AGENTS.md (or CLAUDE.md)

If you found over usage of useEffect, document it on AGENTS.md so next time the LLM knows your preference.

I have been using LLMs since Sonet 3.5 for large enterprise projects (1kk+ lines of code, 1k+ database tables). I just don't ask it to "draw the rest of owl" as the saying goes.

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

#833

Post by pluralmonad »

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…

I don't recall if it was an AGENT.md or CLAUDE.md but one of those was definitely in the Zed repo last time I looked at it. Someone is using AI to work on it.

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

#834

Post by hollowturtle »

maxdo wrote: post #828
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…

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.

It's a definition of what runs and what not on consumer grade computers, Discord has a routine that now checks if memory goes over a certain threshold and eventually restart itselfs, this is a measure of engineering total failure imo

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

#835

Post by bookmark99 »

ben-gy wrote: post #695

I second this article - I built twelve iOS/Mac apps in two weeks with Opus 4.5 - four of them are already in the App Store - I’m a Rails Engineer and never had the time to learn Swift but man does Opus 4.5 make that not even matter - it even handles entitlements, logo & splash screen generation, refactors to remove dead code, edge case assent and hardening, Multiplatform app design, and more - I’m yet to run into a u…

Can you please share the links to these apps in the app store?

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

#836

Post by hollowturtle »

broken_ceiling wrote: post #795
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 bas…

Your argument falls a little flat considering that you mention "hire a dev or two" while the whole narrative is "we don't need software engineers anymore" and Anthropic alone declares that "Although engineers use Claude frequently, more than half said they can “fully delegate” only between 0-20% of their work to Claude" https://www.anthropic.com/research/how-ai-is-transforming-wo...

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

#837

Post by ryandrake »

ku1ik wrote: post #561
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…

How do you know “it has no memory leaks, crashes, ANRs, no performance problems, no network latency bugs or anything” if you built it just yesterday? Isn’t it a bit too early for claims like this? I get it’s easy to bring ideas to life but aren’t we overly optimistic?

Part of the "one day" development time was exhaustively testing it. Since the tool's scope is so small, getting good test coverage was pretty easy. Of course, I'm not guaranteeing through formal verification methods that the code is bug free. I did find bugs, but they were all areas that were poorly specified by me in the requirements.

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

#838

Post by hollowturtle »

quest88 wrote: post #798
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

I'd argue the contrary, YOU KNOW you have the option, ease of entering doesn't mean they will know how to choose better, they will just vibe code more electron apps. In fact my prediction is not there will be less Electron apps but more

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

#839

Post by Staross »

I gave it a try, I asked to do a reddit like forum and it did pretty good but damn I quickly hit the daily limit of the $20 pro account, and it took 10% of the monthly just to do the setup and some basics. I knew LLM were expensive to run but I've never felt it directly. Even if the code is good it's kinda expensive for what you get.

Ho it was also quite funny it used the exact same color as hackernews and a similar layout.

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

#840

Post by pluralmonad »

danfritz wrote: post #757
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…

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

This is very true. But each iteration of learning quirks and installing guardrails carries value forward to later sessions. These rough edges get smoother with use, is my point.
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