Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far • Hacker News Board

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

#961

Post by pigpop » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 1:28 PM UTC

yeasku wrote: post #371

simonw wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be that the people who are focused on building monetizable products with LLMs don't feel the need to share what they are doing - they're too busy quietly getting on with building and marketing their products. Sharing how you're using these tools is quite a lot of work!

What would be more likely, That people making startups is too bussy working to share it on HN or that AI is useless in real projects.

If you haven't noticed, people come here to kill time. If you're killing time then you're not being productive, therefor the people who are heads down trying to launch their startup before they run out of runway are not going to be here until they're ready to market their product.

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

#962

Post by nijave » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 1:31 PM UTC

OldGreenYodaGPT wrote: post #33

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…

I still struggle with these things being _too_ good at generating code. They have a tendency to add abstractions, classes, wrappers, factories, builders to things that didn't really need all that. I find they spit out 6 files worth of code for something that really only needed 2-3 and I'm spending time going back through simplifying.

There are times those extra layers are worth it but it seems LLMs have a bias to add them prematurely and overcomplicate things. You then end up with extra complexity you didn't need.

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

#963

Post by vidarh » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 1:33 PM UTC

BatteryMountain wrote: post #504

OldGreenYodaGPT wrote: post #33

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…

> claude can call ssh and do system admin tasks

Claude set up a Raspberry Pi with a display and conference audio device for me to use as an Alexa replacement tied to Home Assistant.

I gave it an ssh key and gave it root.

Then I told it what I wanted, and it did. It asked for me to confirm certain things, like what I could see on screen, whether I could hear the TTS etc. (it was a bit of a surprise when it was suddenly talking to me while I was minding my own business).

It configured everything, while keeping a meticulous log that I can point it at if I want to set up another device, and eventually turn into a runbook if I need to.

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

#964

Post by vidarh » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 1:38 PM UTC

Yoric wrote: post #88

OldGreenYodaGPT wrote: post #33

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…

You intrigue me. > have it learn your conventions, pull in best practices What do you mean by "have it learn your conventions"? Is there a way to somehow automatically extract your conventions and store it within CLAUDE.md? > For example, we have a custom UI library, and Claude Code has a skill that explains exactly how to use it. Same for how we write Storybooks, how we structure APIs, and basically how we want ever…

Just ask it to.

/init in Claude Code already automatically extracts a bunch, but for something more comprehensive, just tell it which additional types of things you want it to look for and document.

> Did you have to develop these skills yourself? How much work was that? Do you have public examples somewhere?

I don't know about the person above, but I tell Claude to write all my skills and agents for me. With some caveats, you can do this iteratively in a single session ("update the X agent, then re-run it. Repeat until it reliably does Y")

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

#965

Post by vidarh » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 1:42 PM UTC

jack_pp wrote: post #194

oncallthrow wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I ask Claude to do something, it independently, without me even asking or instructing it to, searches the codebase to understand what the convention is. I’ve even found it searching node_modules to find the API of non-public libraries.

This sounds like it would take a huge amount of tokens. I've never used agents so could you disclose how much you pay for it?

I use the $200/month Claude Code plan, and in the last week I've had it generate about half a million words of documentation without hitting any session limits.

I have hit the weekly limit before, briefly, but that took running multiple sessions in parallel continuously for many days.

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

#966

Post by vidarh » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 1:49 PM UTC

maxkfranz wrote: post #917

OldGreenYodaGPT wrote: post #33

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…

> 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 the stuff you do all the time. I agree with this, but I haven't needed to use any advanced features to get good results. I t…

I'd really encourage you to try using agents for tasks that are repeatable and/or wordy but where most of the words are not relevant for ongoing understanding.

It's a tiny step further, and sub-agents provide a massive benefit the moment you're ready to trust the model even a little bit (relax permissions to not have it prompt you for every little thing; review before committing rather than on every file edit) because they limit what goes into the top level context, and can let the model work unassisted for far longer. I now regularly have it run for hours at a time without stopping.

Running and acting on output from the linter is absolutely an example of that which matters even for much shorter runs.

There's no reason to have all the lint output "polluting" the top level context, nor to have the steps the agent needs to take to fix linter issues that can't be auto-fixed by the linter itself. The top level agent should only need to care about whether the linter run passed or failed (and should know it needs to re-run and possibly investigate if it fails).

Just type /agents, select "Create new agent" and describe a task you often do, and then forget about it (or ask Claude to make changes to it for you)

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

#967

Post by philipodonnell » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 2:00 PM UTC

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?

You should just need the AGENTS.md right?

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

#968

Post by vidarh » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 2:18 PM UTC

TacticalCoder wrote: post #255

OldGreenYodaGPT wrote: post #33

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…

> Most software engineers are seriously sleeping on how good LLM agents are right now, especially something like Claude Code. Nobody is sleeping. I'm using LLMs daily to help me in simple coding tasks. But really where is the hurry? At this point not a few weeks go by without the next best thing since sliced bread to come out. Why would I bother "learning" (and there's really nothing to learn here) some tool/workflow…

> Nobody is sleeping. I'm using LLMs daily to help me in simple coding tasks.

That is sleeping.

> But really where is the hurry? At this point not a few weeks go by without the next best thing since sliced bread to come out. Why would I bother "learning" (and there's really nothing to learn here) some tool/workflow that is already outdated by the time it comes out?

You're jumping to conclusions that haven't been justified by any of the development in this space. The learning compounds.

> Do you honestly think a developer not using AI won't be able to adapt to a LLM workflow in, say, 2028 or 2029? It has to be 2026 or... What exactly?

They will, but they'll be competing against people with 2-3 more years of experience in understanding how to leverage these tools.

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

#969

Post by HarHarVeryFunny » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 2:26 PM UTC

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #807

UncleOxidant wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had pretty good luck with LLM agents coding C. In this case a C compiler that supports a subset of C and targets a customizable microcoded state machine/processor. Then I had Gemini code up a simulator/debugger for the target machine in C++ and it did it in short order and quite successfully - lets you single step through the microcode and examine inputs (and set inputs), outputs & current state - did that in an…

That's remarkably similar to something I've just started on - I want to create a self-compiling C compiler targeting (and to run on) an 8-bit micro via a custom VM. This a basically a retro-computing hobby project. I've worked with Gemini Fast on the web to help design the VM ISA, then next steps will be to have some AI (maybe Gemini CLI - currently free) write an assembler, disassembler and interpreter for the ISA,…

Just as a self follow-up here (I hate to do it!), after chatting to Gemini some more more about document creation alternatives, it does seem that Gemini CLI is by far the best way to go, since it's working in similar fashion to Claude Code and making targeted edits (string replacements) to files, rather than regenerating from scratch (unless it has misinterpreted something you said as a request to do that, which would be obvious when it showed you the suggested diff).

Another alternative (not recommended due to potential for "drift") is to use Gemini's Canvas capability where it is working on a document rather than a specification being spread out over Chat, but this document is fully regenerated for every update (unlike Claude's artifacts), so there is potential for it to summarize or drop sections of the document ("drift") rather than just making requested changes. Canvas also doesn't have Artifact's versioning to allow you to go back to undo unwanted drifts/changes.

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

#970

Post by techblueberry » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 3:50 PM UTC

namrog84 wrote: post #747

arkensaw wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's pretty clear to me where this is going. The only question is how long it takes to get there. I don't think its a guarantee. all of the things it can do from that list are greenfield, they just have increasing complexity. The problem comes because even in agentic mode, these models do not (and I would argue, can not) understand code or how it works, they just see patterns and generate a plausible sounding expla…

While I do agree with you. To play the counterpoint advocate though. What if we get to the point where all software is basically created 'on the fly' as greenfield projects as needed? And you never need to have complex large long lived codebase? It is probably incredibly wasteful, but ignoring that, could it work?

I don't think so. I don't think this is how human brains work, and you would have too many problems trying to balance things out. I'm thinking specifically like a complex distributed system. There are a lot of tweaks and iterations you need for things to work with eachother.

But then maybe this means what is a "codebase". If a code base is just a structured set of specs that compile to code ala typescript -> javascript. sure, but then, it's still a long-lived

But maybe you would have to elaborate on, what does "creating software on the fly" look like,. because I'm sure there's a definition where the answer is yes.