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

burkeholland.github.io

921–930 of 1001 posts

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

#921

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Note that blog posts rarely show the 20 other times it failed to build something and only that time that it happened to work. We've been having same progression with self driving cars and they are also stuck on the last 10% for last 5 years

I agree with your observation, but not your conclusion. The 20 times it failed basically don't matter -- they are branches that can just be thrown away, and all that was lost is a few dollars on tokens (ignoring the environmental impact, which is a different conversation).

As long as it can do the thing on a faster overall timeline and with less human attention than a human doing it fully manually, it's going to win. And it will only continue to get better.

And I don't know why people always jump to self-driving cars as the analogy as a negative. We already have self-driving cars. Try a Waymo if you're in a city that has them. Yes, there are still long-tail problems being solved there, and limitations. But they basically work and they're amazing. I feel similarly about agentic development, plus in most cases the failure modes of SWE agents don't involve sudden life and death, so they can be more readily worked around.

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

#922

The question I keep asking myself is "how feasible will any of this be when the VC money runs out?" Right now tokens are crazy cheap. Will the continue to be?

No, they will get even cheaper.

Based on what logic?

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

#923

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…

The crazy part is, once you have it setup and adapted your workflow, you start to notice all sorts of other "small" things: claude can call ssh and do system admin tasks. It works amazingly well. I have 3 VM's, which depends on each other (proxmox with openwrt, adguard, unbound), and claude can prove to me that my dns chains works perfectly, my firewalls are perfect etc as claude can ssh into each. Setting up service…

I have a /fix-ci-build slash command that instructs Claude how to use `gh` to get the latest build from that specific project's Github Actions and get the logs for the build

In addition there are instructions on how and where to push the possible fixes and how to check the results.

I've yet to encounter a build failure it couldn't fix automatically.

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

#924

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't there more indirection as long as LLMs use "human" programming languages?

More indirection in the sense that there's a layer between you and the code, sure. Less in that the code doesn't really matter as such and you're not having to think hard about the minutiae of programming in order to make something you want. It's very possible that "AI-oriented" programming languages will become the standard eventually (at least for new projects).

One benefit of conventional code is that it expresses logic in an unambiguous way. Much of "the minutiae" is deciding what happens in edge cases. It's even harder to express that in a human language than in computer languages. For some domains it probably doesn't matter.

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

#925
post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insanely difficult to you maybe because you stopped learning. What you cannot create you don't understand.

Are you honestly saying that building a new spec-compliant WebAssembly runtime from scratch isn't an absurdly difficult project?

[deleted]

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

#926

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…

AI amplified development has the most impact on build-vs-buy decisions.

We should expect the decreased difficulty of creating software to drive down prices.

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

#927
I can't quite figure out what sort of irony the blurb at the bottom of the post is. (I'm unsure if it was intentional snark, a human typo, or an inadvertent demonstration of Haiku not being well suited for spelling and grammar checks), but either way I got a chuckle:

> Disclaimer: This post was written by a human and edited for spelling, grammer by Haiku 4.5

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

#928

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Note that blog posts rarely show the 20 other times it failed to build something and only that time that it happened to work. We've been having same progression with self driving cars and they are also stuck on the last 10% for last 5 years

With "art" we're now at a situation where I can get 50 variations of a image prompt within seconds from an LLM.

Does it matter that 49 of them "failed"? It cost me fractions of a cent, so not really.

If every one of the 50 variants was drawn by a human and iterated over days, there would've been a major cost attached to every image and I most likely wouldn't have asked for 50 variations anyway.

It's the same with code. The agent can iterate over dozens of possible solutions in minutes or a few hours. Codex Web even has a 4x mode that gives you 4 alternate solutions to the same issue. Complete waste of time and money with humans, but with LLMs you can just do it.

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

#929
post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I think you are strawmanning what "vibe coders" do when they build stuff. It's not simple one-shot generation of eg twitter clones, it's really just iterative product development through an inconsistently capable/spotty LLM developer. It's not really that different from a product m…

Friendly reminder: the comment is under a post that is hyping the capability of LLMs.

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

#930
post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> 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. But that's precisely why you don't hear about these products: the creators don't disclose that they were vibe-coded, because if they do, that invites competition. I personally know of four vibe-coded products that generate over $10k/mo. Two of them were made by one friend, one was…

And I know 100 such products that are making $100k/month, do you believe me or not?

I'm afraid your numbers are not any more informative or useful than mine.

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