Whoa, I think Claude Sonnet 4.5 was a disappointment, but Claude Sonnet 4.6 is definitely the future!
Claude Sonnet 4.6
941–950 of 1001 posts
Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6
#942The demise of saas has been overplayed imho. When companies buy software they are essentially buying something that solves a problem and the insurance that comes with that. Part of that means they get to pick up the phone and complain if something doesn't work and someone on the other end has to listen. There is also a strong community aspect to software, someone asks for an enhancement others can benefit etc. I just…
I’m at $LARGE_ENTERPRISE_SAAS and I agree. There is a mass psychosis going on around what these LLM tools (which I use daily) are capable of *at scale*. The amount of business processes and tasks these software suites can, and must perform at near 100% correctness every time is massive, across an insane number of domains, accounting for an insane number of laws, countries, languages, browser configurations, business requests, legal teams. The list goes on, and while you can bootstrap a front end that appears to do 80% of a large dinosaur competitor like ours, the reality is it can’t, and the context windows to get there are in the orders of magnitude larger than they are today.
The weird part is that people at our company also fail to see this. “This vibe coder is going to recreate 20+ years of code, use cases, business processes and integrations for thousands of companies across hundreds of domains!” is uttered every day and just simply isn’t true.
Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6
#943The demise of saas has been overplayed imho. When companies buy software they are essentially buying something that solves a problem and the insurance that comes with that. Part of that means they get to pick up the phone and complain if something doesn't work and someone on the other end has to listen. There is also a strong community aspect to software, someone asks for an enhancement others can benefit etc. I just…
It won’t be the demise of general purpose SaaS like CRM, though it may be the rise of ridiculously full featured f/oss alternatives. However, niche stuff like vertical-specific CRUD apps that used to be able to charge a heavy SaaS premium simply because they could develop CRUD apps and UI faster than their customers are toast.
> However, niche stuff like vertical-specific CRUD apps that used to be able to charge a heavy SaaS premium simply because they could develop CRUD apps and UI faster than their customers are toast.
You'd be surprised how many industries are just not that tech-savvy. Your average real estate company or accounting firm doesn't have the expertise to build even the simplest apps, and a keen employee vibe coding a CRUD app at a non-tech company is only 20% of the problem. Where are they hosting the CRUD app? How are they getting alerted when the CRUD app goes down, or when it starts spitting 500s? Who's handling database and OS upgrades for the server hosting the web app? These may sound like simple things to you and I, but to a company with zero expertise, the first time their database goes down and they (and ChatGPT) can't figure out why, they get spooked. If these companies wanted to avoid paying SaaS they'd be better off using Excel.
I started my career in consulting and it was filled with cases like this, even pre-AI, where a non-tech company built some kind of internal tool, it got too unwieldy because it was coded like shit by people with minimal development experience, and they ended up outsourcing hosting and maintenance because it was too difficult and they had no interest in building a software department.
Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6
#944I ran the same test I ran on Opus 4.6: feeding it my whole personal collection of ~900 poems which spans ~16 years It is a far cry from Opus 4.6. Opus 4.6 was (is!) a giant leap, the largest since Gemini 2.5 pro. Didn't hallucinate anything and produced honestly mind-blowing analyses of the collection as a whole. It was a clear leap forward. Sonnet 4.6 feels like an evolution of whatever the previous models were doin…
Opus 4.6 has been awful for me and my team. It goes immediately off the rails and jumps to conclusions on wants and asks and just keeps chugging along forever and won't let anything stop it down whatever path it decides. 4.5 was awesome and is our still go-to model.
That's interesting, 4.6 is finally when AI started to become good in my eyes. I have a very strict plan phase, argue, plan then partial execute. I like it to do boilerplate then I do the hard stuff myself and have it do a once over at the end.
Although I have had it try to debug something and just get stuck chugging tokens.
Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6
#945I see a big focus on computer use - you can tell they think there is a lot of value there and in truth it may be as big as coding if they convincingly pull it off. However I am still mystified by the safety aspect. They say the model has greatly improved resistance. But their own safety evaluation says 8% of the time their automated adversarial system was able to one-shot a successful injection takeover even with saf…
Their goal is to monopolize labor for anything that has to do with i/o on a computer, which is way more than SWE. Its simple, this technology literally cannot create new jobs it simply can cause one engineer (or any worker whos job has to do with computer i/o) to do the work of 3, therefore allowing you to replace workers (and overwork the ones you keep). Companies don't need "more work" half the "features"/"products…
It's not as easy to build a business as just copying someone (otherwise we'd have all been doing that long before LLMs).
I expect the software market will change from lots of big kitchen sink included systems and services to many smaller more specialized solutions with small agile teams behind them.
Some engineers that lose their jobs are going to create new businesses and new jobs.
The question in my mind: is there enough feature and software demand out there to keep all of the engineers employed at 3x the productivity? Maybe. Software has been limited on the supply side by how expensive it was to produce. Now it may bump into limits on the demand side instead.
Meanwhile LLMs are better than junior devs, so nobody wants to hire a junior dev. No idea how we get senior devs then. How many people will be scared away from entering this career path?
The job has changed. How many software engineers will leave the career now that the job is more of a technically minded product person and code reviewer?
I can't predict how it all plays out, but I'm along for the ride. Grieving the loss of programming and trying to get used to this new world.
Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6
#946Earlier quoted context omitted.
This whole comment thread here is really echoing and adding to some thoughts ive had lately on the shift from considering LLMs replacing engineering to make software (much of which is about integration, longevity and customization of a general system), vs LLMs replacing buying software. If most software is just used by me to do a specific task, then being able to make software for me to do that task will become the n…
Taking it further, imagine a traditional desktop OS but it generates your programs on the fly. Google's weird AI browser project is kind of a step in this direction. Instead of starting with a list of programs and services and customizing your work to that workflow, you start with the task you need accomplished and the operating system creates an optimized UI flow specifically for that task.
but bringing it back, you 1° need to pitch this idea to investors liberate money to cover the Sahara desert with a huge server to suffice these sci-fi needs /s
Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6
#947> i need to wash my helicopter at the helicopter wash. it is 50m away, should i walk or fly there with my helicopter. Sonnet 4.6: Walk! Flying a helicopter 50 metres would be more trouble than it's worth — by the time you've done your pre-flight checks, spun up the rotors, lifted off, and then safely landed again, you'd have walked there and back twice. Just stroll over.
I think this is my favourite test. You can just tell it was programmed on smug Reddit comments talking about how Americans drive to places 50 metres away.
It's amusing, but when it comes to doing actually work, I just don't care if my LLM fails things like this.
I'm not trying to trick it, so falling for tricks is harmless for my use cases. Does it write quality, secure code? Does it give me accurate answers about coding/physics/biology. If it gets those wrong, that's a problem. If it fails to solve riddles, well, that'll be a problem iff I decide to build a riddle solver using it.
Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6
#948I ran the same test I ran on Opus 4.6: feeding it my whole personal collection of ~900 poems which spans ~16 years It is a far cry from Opus 4.6. Opus 4.6 was (is!) a giant leap, the largest since Gemini 2.5 pro. Didn't hallucinate anything and produced honestly mind-blowing analyses of the collection as a whole. It was a clear leap forward. Sonnet 4.6 feels like an evolution of whatever the previous models were doin…
I'm curious if you tried the same prompt for chatgpt 5.2
Did it not give you a mind blowing analysis?
Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6
#949I see a big focus on computer use - you can tell they think there is a lot of value there and in truth it may be as big as coding if they convincingly pull it off. However I am still mystified by the safety aspect. They say the model has greatly improved resistance. But their own safety evaluation says 8% of the time their automated adversarial system was able to one-shot a successful injection takeover even with saf…
Their goal is to monopolize labor for anything that has to do with i/o on a computer, which is way more than SWE. Its simple, this technology literally cannot create new jobs it simply can cause one engineer (or any worker whos job has to do with computer i/o) to do the work of 3, therefore allowing you to replace workers (and overwork the ones you keep). Companies don't need "more work" half the "features"/"products…
This worldview has, IMO, one omission. It implicitly assumes that everything will stay the same except for LLMs getting better and better, but in reality there are many interconnected factors in play.
Will it fundamentally change or eliminate some jobs? I think yes.
But at the same time, no one knows how this will play out in the long run. We certainly shouldn't extrapolate what will happen in the job market or society by treating AI performance as an independent variable.
Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6
#950Earlier quoted context omitted.
It won’t be the demise of general purpose SaaS like CRM, though it may be the rise of ridiculously full featured f/oss alternatives. However, niche stuff like vertical-specific CRUD apps that used to be able to charge a heavy SaaS premium simply because they could develop CRUD apps and UI faster than their customers are toast.
> However, niche stuff like vertical-specific CRUD apps that used to be able to charge a heavy SaaS premium simply because they could develop CRUD apps and UI faster than their customers are toast. You'd be surprised how many industries are just not that tech-savvy. Your average real estate company or accounting firm doesn't have the expertise to build even the simplest apps, and a keen employee vibe coding a CRUD ap…
One thing to consider is that pre-AI homegrown software is a house of cards, whereas post-AI vice coded software can be better than what most average engineer can craft.
They’re also getting quite good at fixing 500 errors at the speed of a prompt, which is faster than humans