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Opus 4.6 is nuts. Everything I throw at it works. Frontend, backend, algorithms—it does not matter. I start with a PRD, ask for a step-by-step plan, and just e

by Frannky 7mo ago

Opus 4.6 is nuts. Everything I throw at it works. Frontend, backend, algorithms—it does not matter. I start with a PRD, ask for a step-by-step plan, and just execute on each step at a time. Sometimes ideas are dumb, but checking and guiding step by step helps it ship working things in hours. It was also the first AI I felt, "Damn, this thing is smarter than me." The other crazy thing is that with today's tech, these things can be made to work at 1k tokens/sec with multiple agents working at the same time, each at that speed.

eru 7mo ago
> [...] with multiple agents working at the same time, each at that speed. Horizontal parallelising of tasks doesn't really require any modern tech. But I agree that Opus 4.6 with 1M context window is really good at lots of routine programming tasks.
- travisgriggs 7mo ago
  Opus helped me brick my RPi CM4 today. It glibly apologized for telling to use an e instead of a 6 in a boot loader sequence. Spent an hour or so unraveling the mess. My feeling are growing more and more conflicted about these tools. They are here to stay obviously. I’m honestly uncertain about the junior engineers I’m working with who are more productive than they might be otherwise, but are gaining zero (or very little) experience. It’s like the future is a world where the entire programming sphere is dominated by the clueless non technical management that we’ve all had to deal with in small proportion a time or two.
  - eru 7mo ago
    > I’m honestly uncertain about the junior engineers I’m working with who are more productive than they might be otherwise, but are gaining zero (or very little) experience. Well, (economic) progress means being able to do more with less. A Fordian-style conveyor belt factory can churn out cars with relatively unskilled labour. Economising on human capital is economising on a scarce input. We had these kinds of shifts before. Compare also how planes used to have a pilot, copilot and flight engineer. We don't have that anymore, but it used to be a place for people to learn. But pilot education has adapted. Or check how spreadsheet software has removed a lot of the worst rote work in finance. That change happened perhaps in the 1980s. Finance has adapted. > Opus helped me brick my RPi CM4 today. It glibly apologized for telling to use an e instead of a 6 in a boot loader sequence. Yes, these things do best when they have a (simulated) environment they can make mistakes in and that can give them clear and fast feedback.
    - hvb2 7mo ago
      > Yes, these things do best when they have a (simulated) environment they can make mistakes in and that can give them clear and fast feedback. This always felt like a reason to throw it at coding. With its rigid syntax you'll know quickly and cheaply if what was written passes an absolute minimaal level of quality.
      - eru 7mo ago
        Well, rigid syntax, type checkers, automated tests, etc. They all help.
        travisgriggs 7mo ago
        Has this been shown to be true? Or just anecdotal?
        eru 7mo ago
        Anecdotal from my own experience. But someone might have done a study by now: they are much cheaper and quicker to run on AIs than on undergrad students (yet alone professional devs). Also pre-AI: when I set up nice property tests, I could develop much better even while a bit tired.
vessenes 7mo ago
I’ll put out a suggestion you pair with codex or deepthink for audit and review - opus is still prone to … enthusiastic architectural decisions. I promise you will be at least thankful and at most like ‘wtf?’ at some audit outputs. Also shout out to beads - I highly recommend you pair it with beads from yegge: opus can lay out a large project with beads, and keep track of what to do next and churn through the list beautifully with a little help.
- petesergeant 7mo ago
  I've been pairing it with Codex using https://github.com/pjlsergeant/moarcode https://github.com/pjlsergeant/moarcode The amount of genuine fuck-ups Codex finds makes me skeptical of people who are placing a lot of trust in Claude alone.
  - vessenes 7mo ago
    Nice. Yeah I have them connect through beads, which combined with a git log is a lot of information - it feels smoother to me than this looks. But I agree with the sentiment. Codex isn't my favorite for understanding and implementing. But I appreciate the intelligence and pickiness very much.
dzink 7mo ago
Opus 4.6 is AGI in my book. They won’t admit it, but it’s absolutely true. It shows initiative in not only getting things right but also adding improvements that the original prompt didn't request that match the goals of the job.
- winrid 7mo ago
  On the adding improvements and being helpful thing, isn't that part of the system prompt?
  - dcre 7mo ago
    You could put whatever you wanted in the GPT-4 system prompt and it wasn't doing shit.
    - winrid 7mo ago
      True. I retract my sentiment :D
- deleted 7mo ago
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- dyauspitr 7mo ago
  I don’t know if Opus is AGI but on a broader note, that’s how we will get AGI. Not some consciousness like people are expecting. It’s just going to be chatbot that’s very hard to stump and starts making actual scientific breakthroughs and solving long standing problems.
  - unshavedyak 7mo ago
    I'll be more likely to agree with anything being AGI if it doesn't have such obvious and common brittleness. These LLMs all go off the rails when the context window gets large. Their context is also easy to "poison", and so it's better to rollback conversations that went bad rather than trying to steer them back to the light. There's probably more examples, but to me AGI must move beyond the above issues. Though frankly context window might just be a symptom of poor harness than anything, still - it illustrates my general issue with them being considered AGI as it stands today. Claude 4.6 is getting crazy good though, i'll give you that.
interpol_p 7mo ago
I had Opus 4.6 running on a backend bug for hours. It got nowhere. Turned out the problem was in AWS X-ray swizzling the fetch method and not handling the same argument types as the original, which led to cryptic errors. I had Opus 4.6 tell me I was "seeing things wrong" when I tried to have it correct some graphical issues. It got stuck in a loop of re-introducing the same bug every hour or so in an attempt to fix the issue. I'm not disagreeing with your experience, but in my experience it is largely the same as what I had with Opus 4.5 / Codex / etc.
- deleted 7mo ago
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- toraway 7mo ago
  Haha, reminds me of an unbelievably aggravating exchange with Codex (GPT 5.4 / High) where it was unflinchingly gaslighting me about undesired behavior still occurring after a change it made that it was adamant simply could not be happening. It started by insisting I was repeatedly making a typo and still would not budge even after I started copy/pasting the full terminal history of what I was entering and the unabridged output, and eventually pivoted to darkly insinuating I was tampering with my shell environment as if I was trying to mislead it or something. Ultimately it turned out that it forgot it was supposed to be applying the fixes to the actual server instead of the local dev environment, and had earlier in the conversation switched from editing directly over SSH to pushing/pulling the local repo to the remote due to diffs getting mangled.
Aperocky 7mo ago
I had been able to get it into the classic AI loop once. It was about a problem with calculation around filling a topographical water basin with sedimentation where calculation is discrete (e.g. turn based) and that edge case where both water and sediments would overflow the basin; To make the matter simple, fact was A, B, C, and it oscillated between explanation 1 which refuted C, explanation 2 which refuted A and explanation 3 that refuted B. I'll give it to opus training stability that my 3 tries using it all consistently got into this loop, so I decided to directly order it to do a brute force solution that avoided (but didn't solve) this problem. I did feel like with a human, there's no way that those 3 loop would happen by the second time. Or at least the majority of us. But there is just no way to get through to opus 4.6
hrishikesh-s 7mo ago
Opus-4.6 is so far ahead of the rest that I think Anthropic is the winner in winner-take-all
- steve-atx-7600 7mo ago
  Codex doesn't seem that far behind. I use the top model available for api key use and its gotten faster this month even on the max effort level (not like a cheetah - more like not so damn painful anymore). Plus, it also forks agents in parallel - for speed & to avoid polluting the main context. I.e. it will fork explorer agents while investigating (kind of amusing because they're named after famous scientists).
koreth1 7mo ago
I wish I had this kind of experience. I threw a tedious but straightforward task at Claude Code using Opus 4.6 late last week: find the places in a React code base where we were using useState and useEffect to calculate a value that was purely dependent on the inputs to useEffect, and replace them with useMemo. I told it to be careful to only replace cases where the change did not introduce any behavior changes, and I put it in plan mode first. It gave me an impressive plan of attack, including a reasonable way to determine which code it could safely modify. I told it to start with just a few files and let me review; its changes looked good. So I told it to proceed with the rest of the code. It made hundreds of changes, as expected (big code base). And most of them were correct! Except the places where it decided to do things like put its "const x = useMemo(...)" call after some piece of code that used the value of "x", meaning I now had a bunch of undefined variable references. There were some other missteps too. I tried to convince it to fix the places where it had messed up, but it quickly started wanting to make larger structural changes (extracting code into helper functions, etc.) rather than just moving the offending code a few lines higher in the source file. Eventually I gave up trying to steer it and, with the help of another dev on my team, fixed up all the broken code by hand. It probably still saved time compared to making all the changes myself. But it was way more frustrating.
- dyauspitr 7mo ago
  You’re using it wrong. As soon as it starts going off the rails once you’ve repeated yourself, you drop the whole session and start over.
  - saghm 7mo ago
    One of the more subtle points that seems to be crucial is that it works a lot better when it can use the context as part of its own work rather than being polluted by unrelated details. Even better than restarting when it's off the rails is to avoid it as much as possible by proactively starting a new conversation as soon as anything in the history of the existing one stops being relevant. I've found it more effective to manually tell it most what's currently in the context in a fresh session skip the irrelevant bits even if they're fairly small than relying on it to figure out that it's no longer relevant (or give it instructions indicating that, which feels like a crapshoot whether it's actually going to prune or just bloat things further with that instruction just being added into the mix). To echo what the parent comment said, it's almost frustrating how effective it can be at certain tasks that I wouldn't ever have the patience for. At my job recently I needed to prototype calling some Python code via WASM using the Rust wasmtime engine, and setting up the code structure to have the bytes for the WASM component, the arguments I wanted to pass to the function, and the WIT describing the interface for the function, it was able to fill in all of the boilerplate needed so that the function calls worked properly within a minute or two on the first try; reading through all the documentation and figuring out how exactly which half dozen assorted things I had to import and hook up together in the correct order would have probably taken me an hour at minimum. I don't have any particular insight on whether or not these tools will become even more powerful over time, and I still have fairly strong concerns about how AI tools will affect society (both in terms of how they're used and the amount of in energy used to produce them in the first place), but given how much the tech industry tends to prioritize productivity over social concerns, I have to assume that my future employment is going to be heavily impacted by my willingness to adopt and use these tools. I can't deny at this point that having it as an option would make me more productive than if I refuse to use it, regardless of my personal opinions on it.
sarchertech 7mo ago
What kinds of things are you building? This is not my experience at all. Just today I asked Claude using opus 4.6 to build out a test harness for a new dynamic database diff tool. Everything seemed to be fine but it built a test suite for an existing diff tool. It set everything up in the new directory, but it was actually testing code and logic from a preexisting directory despite the plan being correct before I told it to execute. I started over and wrote out a few skeleton functions myself then asked it write tests for those to test for some new functionality. Then my plan was to the ask it to add that functionality using the tests as guardrails. Well the tests didn’t actually call any of the functions under test. They just directly implemented the logic I asked for in the tests. After $50 and 2 hours I finally got something working only to realize that instead of creating a new pg database to test against, it found a dev database I had lying around and started adding tables to it. When I managed to fix that, it decided that it needed to rebuild multiple docker components before each test and test them down after each one. After about 4 hours and $75, I managed to get something working that was probably more code than I would have written in 4 hours, but I think it was probably worse than what I would have come up with on my own. And I really have no idea if it works because the day was over and I didn’t have the energy left to review it all. We’ve recently been tasked at work with spending more money on Claude (not being more productive the metric is literally spending more money) and everyone is struggling to do anything like what the posts on HN say they are doing. So far no one in my org in a very large tech company has managed to do anything very impressive with Claude other than bringing down prod 2 days ago. Yes I’m using planning mode and clearing context and being specific with requirements and starting new sessions, and every other piece of advice I’ve read. I’ve had much more luck using opus 4.6 in vs studio to make more targeted changes, explain things, debug etc… Claude seems too hard to wrangle and it isn’t good enough for you to be operating that far removed from the code.
- dcre 7mo ago
  Curious what language and stack. And have people at your company had marginally more success with greenfield projects like prototypes? I guess that’s what you’re describing, though it sounds like it’s a directory in a monorepo maybe?
vips7L 7mo ago
Bullshit.
phendrenad2 7mo ago
The replies to this really make me think that some people are getting left behind the AI age. Colleges are likely already teaching how to prompt, but a lot of existing software devs just don't get it. I encourage people who aren't having success with AI to watch some youtube videos on best practices.
- germinalphrase 7mo ago
  Share one
  - phendrenad2 7mo ago
    Okay the process is simple. You're going to go to another website, called YouTube. Don't be alarmed. First read all the steps so you don't miss any, once you start going to the other site you won't be able to see this one. You might want to write these down on a piece of paper first. Okay here we go: 1. Click in the bar at the top of the page that says ycombinator.com 2. type this in: youtube.com 3. press enter 4. There will be a box at the top that says "search", click that 5. type in "tips and tricks for agentic coding" 6. press enter 7. a list of videos should appear, watch them all
    - arcanemachiner 7mo ago
      But what if they find a bad one? There's a lot of junk out there.
      - phendrenad2 7mo ago
        Yes, this can happen. Some people just have the worst luck, and will always find the bad one. This is why Greene made "stay away from unlucky people" law 10 out of 48. It's really that important.
- namtab00 7mo ago
  I am such a dev (backend). I'm working in a codebase of 200+ "microservices", separate repos, each deployed as multiple FaaS, CQRS-style. None of it my choice, everything precedes me, many repos I know nothing of. Little to no code re-use between them. Any trace of "business logic" is so distributed in multiple repos, that I have no possible use of LLM codegen, unless I can somehow feed it ALL the codebase. I've tried generating some tests, but they always miss the mark, as in the system under test is almost always the wrong one. I guess LLM are cool for greenfield, but when the brownfield is really brown, there's no use for LLMs.
scroogey 7mo ago
Just yesterday I asked it to repeat a very simple task 10 times. It ended up doing it 15 times. It wasn't a problem per se, just a bit jarring that it was unable to follow such simple instructions (it even repeated my desire for 10 repetitions at the start!).
raincole 7mo ago
It's so far the best model that answers my questions about Wolfram language. That being said it's the only use case for me. I won't subscribe to something that I can't use with third party harness.
- copperx 7mo ago
  I use a Claude sub with oh-my-pi, but I do so with lots of anxiety, knowing that I will be banned at any moment.
eknkc 7mo ago
I find that Opus misses a lot of details in the code base when I want it to design a feature or something. It jumps to a basic solution which is actually good but might affect something elsewhere. GPT 5.4 on codex cli has been much more reliable for me lately. I used to have opus write and codex review, I now to the opposite (I actually have codex write and both review in parallel). So on the latest models for my use case gpt > opus but these change all the time. Edit: also the harness is shit. Claude code has been slow, weird and a resource hog. Refuses to read now standardized .agents dirs so I need symlink gymnastics. Hides as much info as it can… Codex cli is working much better lately.
- toraway 7mo ago
  Codex CLI is so much more pleasant to use than CC. I cancelled my CC subscription after the OpenCode thing, but somewhat ironically have recently found myself naturally trying the native Codex CLI client first more often over OpenCode. Kinda funny how you don't actually need to use coercion if you put in the engineering work to build a product that's competitive on its own technical merits...
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fbrncci 7mo ago
I am starting to believe it’s not OPUS but developers getting better at using LLMs across the board. And not realizing they are just getting much better at using these tools. I also thought it was OPUS 4.5 (also tested a lot with 4.6) and then in February switched to only using auto mode in the coding IDEs. They do not use OPUS (most of the times), and I’m ending up with a similar result after a very rough learning curve. Now switching back to OPUS I notice that I get more out of it, but it’s no longer a huge difference. In a lot of cases OPUS is actually in the way after learning to prompt more effectively with cheaper models. The big difference now is that I’m just paying 60-90$ month for 40-50hrs of weekly usage… while I was inching towards 1000$ with OPUS. I chose these auto modes because they don’t dig into usage based pricing or throttling which is a pretty sweet deal.
- copperx 7mo ago
  I had similar thoughts regarding "we are simply getting better at using them", but the man I tried Gemini again and reconsidered.
- danielbln 7mo ago
  Opus is not an acronym.
  - devld 7mo ago
    O.P.U.S OutProgram U Soon
  - fbrncci 7mo ago
    I know, but its certainly a new paradigm.
olalonde 7mo ago
> PRD Is it Baader-Meinhof or is everyone on HN suddenly using obscure acronyms?
- shujito 7mo ago
  It stands for Product Requirements Document, it is something commonly used in project planning and management.
  - epicureanideal 7mo ago
    Maybe so, but personally it seemed to be referred to as a "specification" or "spec" for a long time, and then suddenly around maybe 5 years ago I started to hear people use "PRD". I'm not sure what caused the change.
    - olalonde 7mo ago
      Yep, software specs or requirements[0]. Thanks to LLMs it's easy to look up acronyms, but still, it feels like there's an uptick of them on HN[1]... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_requirements_specification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_requirements_specific... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323316 who the hell knows that version of "RSI"?
- deleted 7mo ago
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- nvarsj 7mo ago
  Seems commonly used in Big Tech - first time I heard it was in my current job. Now it's seared into my brain since it's used so much. Among many other acronyms which I won't bore you with.
ai_fry_ur_brain 7mo ago
Im convinced everyone saying this is building the simplest web apps, and doing magic tricks on themselves.
- raldi 7mo ago
  What evidence would convince you otherwise?
  - isbvhodnvemrwvn 7mo ago
    Session dumps would be nice.
- hparadiz 7mo ago
  I've been building a new task manager in C for Linux. If you're not using AI you are cooked. You just don't realize it yet. https://i.imgur.com/YXLZvy3.png https://i.imgur.com/YXLZvy3.png
  - popcorncowboy 7mo ago
    > If you're not using AI you are cooked. You just don't realize it yet. Truth. But not just “using”. Because here’s where this ship has already landed: humans will not write code, humans will not review code. I see mostly rage against this idea, but it is already here. Resistance is futile. There will be no “hand crafted software” shops. You have at most 3-4 years left if you think this is your job.
    - hparadiz 7mo ago
      I don't really agree. People should still understand the code because sometimes the AI solution really is wrong and I have to shove my hand in it's guts and force it to use my solution or even explain the reasoning. People should be studying architecture. Cause now I can orchestrate stuff that used to take teams and I would throwaway as a non-viable idea. Now I can just do it. But no you will still be reviewing code.
fooker 7mo ago
I have a PhD in a niche field and this can do my job ;) Not sure if this means I should get a more interesting job or if we are all going to be at the mercy of UBI eventually.
- suzzer99 7mo ago
  We're never getting UBI. See the latest interview with the Palantir CEO where he talks about white collar workers having to take more hands-on jobs that they may not feel as satisfied with. IE - tending their manors and compounds. RIP widespread middle class. It was a good 80-year run.
  - fooker 7mo ago
    I wonder if we are going to find more creative solutions.
- _heimdall 7mo ago
  An economy, and likely a society, fails if everyone is at the mercy of a UBI.
  - copperx 7mo ago
    But what's the alternative? Can any economy succeed with a >50% unemployment rate?
    - _heimdall 7mo ago
      Don't confuse UBI and employment or even income though. If we find ourselves replacing or exceeding current productivity without humans working in the system we have to fundamentally rethink our system. You likely wouldn't need money at all in that future, for example. What does the money really mean when everyone I'd guaranteed to have all the basics covered? Is money really helping to store value created via labor when there is no labor? And is money providing price discover when the cost of resources and manufacturing are moving towards zero? If labor is replaced with tech, and I think that's a big if, I don't see any outcome other than a totalitarian distopia that will fail much like the Soviet Union.
wetpaws 7mo ago
[dead]
gregharned 7mo ago
[flagged]
- edot 7mo ago
  LLM written comments are not allowed on HN. This comment is written by an LLM and the account is fresh.
schainks 7mo ago
> It was also the first AI I felt, "Damn, this thing is smarter than me." 1000% agree. It's also easy to talk to it about something you're not sure it said and derive a better, more elegant solution with simple questioning. Gemini 3.1 also gives me these vibes.
ed_elliott_asc 7mo ago
It’s still pretty poor writing powershell
rafaelmn 7mo ago
I've seen a few instances of where Claude showed me a better way to do something and many many more instances of where it fails miserably. Super simple problem : I had a ZMK keyboard layout definition I wanted it to convert it to QMK for a different keyboard that had one key less so it just had to trim one outer key. It took like 45 minutes of back and forth to get it right - I could have done it in 30 min manually tops with looking up docs for everything. Capability isn't the impressive part it's the tenacity/endurance.
marginalia_nu 7mo ago
My experience is that it gets you 80-90% of the way at 20x the speed, but coaxing it into fixing the remaining 10-20% happens at a staggeringly slow speed. All programming is like this to some extent, but Claude's 80/20 behavior is so much more extreme. It can almost build anything in 15-30 minutes, but after those 15-30 minutes are up, it's only "almost built". Then you need to spend hours, days, maybe even weeks getting past the "almost". Big part of why everyone seems to be vibe coding apps, but almost nobody seems to be shipping anything.
devld 7mo ago
But does it still generate slop? I'm late to the party and I'm just getting started with Antrophic models. I have been finding Sonnet decent enough, but it seems to have trouble naming variables correctly (it's not just that most names are poor and undescriptive, sometimes it names it wrong, confusing) or sometimes unnecessarily declaring, re-declaring variables, encoding, decoding, rather than using the value that's already there etc. Is Opus better at this?
- arcanemachiner 7mo ago
  You really need to try it for yourself. People working in different domains get wildly different results.
slopinthebag 7mo ago
> It was also the first AI I felt, "Damn, this thing is smarter than me." Sounds like it is.

by Frannky 7mo ago

eru 7mo ago

> [...] with multiple agents working at the same time, each at that speed. Horizontal parallelising of tasks doesn't really require any modern tech. But I agree that Opus 4.6 with 1M context window is really good at lots of routine programming tasks.

travisgriggs 7mo ago
Opus helped me brick my RPi CM4 today. It glibly apologized for telling to use an e instead of a 6 in a boot loader sequence. Spent an hour or so unraveling the mess. My feeling are growing more and more conflicted about these tools. They are here to stay obviously. I’m honestly uncertain about the junior engineers I’m working with who are more productive than they might be otherwise, but are gaining zero (or very little) experience. It’s like the future is a world where the entire programming sphere is dominated by the clueless non technical management that we’ve all had to deal with in small proportion a time or two.
- eru 7mo ago
  > I’m honestly uncertain about the junior engineers I’m working with who are more productive than they might be otherwise, but are gaining zero (or very little) experience. Well, (economic) progress means being able to do more with less. A Fordian-style conveyor belt factory can churn out cars with relatively unskilled labour. Economising on human capital is economising on a scarce input. We had these kinds of shifts before. Compare also how planes used to have a pilot, copilot and flight engineer. We don't have that anymore, but it used to be a place for people to learn. But pilot education has adapted. Or check how spreadsheet software has removed a lot of the worst rote work in finance. That change happened perhaps in the 1980s. Finance has adapted. > Opus helped me brick my RPi CM4 today. It glibly apologized for telling to use an e instead of a 6 in a boot loader sequence. Yes, these things do best when they have a (simulated) environment they can make mistakes in and that can give them clear and fast feedback.
  - hvb2 7mo ago
    > Yes, these things do best when they have a (simulated) environment they can make mistakes in and that can give them clear and fast feedback. This always felt like a reason to throw it at coding. With its rigid syntax you'll know quickly and cheaply if what was written passes an absolute minimaal level of quality.
    - eru 7mo ago
      Well, rigid syntax, type checkers, automated tests, etc. They all help.
      - travisgriggs 7mo ago
        Has this been shown to be true? Or just anecdotal?
        eru 7mo ago
        Anecdotal from my own experience. But someone might have done a study by now: they are much cheaper and quicker to run on AIs than on undergrad students (yet alone professional devs). Also pre-AI: when I set up nice property tests, I could develop much better even while a bit tired.

vessenes 7mo ago

I’ll put out a suggestion you pair with codex or deepthink for audit and review - opus is still prone to … enthusiastic architectural decisions. I promise you will be at least thankful and at most like ‘wtf?’ at some audit outputs. Also shout out to beads - I highly recommend you pair it with beads from yegge: opus can lay out a large project with beads, and keep track of what to do next and churn through the list beautifully with a little help.

petesergeant 7mo ago
I've been pairing it with Codex using https://github.com/pjlsergeant/moarcode https://github.com/pjlsergeant/moarcode The amount of genuine fuck-ups Codex finds makes me skeptical of people who are placing a lot of trust in Claude alone.
- vessenes 7mo ago
  Nice. Yeah I have them connect through beads, which combined with a git log is a lot of information - it feels smoother to me than this looks. But I agree with the sentiment. Codex isn't my favorite for understanding and implementing. But I appreciate the intelligence and pickiness very much.

dzink 7mo ago

Opus 4.6 is AGI in my book. They won’t admit it, but it’s absolutely true. It shows initiative in not only getting things right but also adding improvements that the original prompt didn't request that match the goals of the job.

winrid 7mo ago
On the adding improvements and being helpful thing, isn't that part of the system prompt?
- dcre 7mo ago
  You could put whatever you wanted in the GPT-4 system prompt and it wasn't doing shit.
  - winrid 7mo ago
    True. I retract my sentiment :D
deleted 7mo ago
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dyauspitr 7mo ago
I don’t know if Opus is AGI but on a broader note, that’s how we will get AGI. Not some consciousness like people are expecting. It’s just going to be chatbot that’s very hard to stump and starts making actual scientific breakthroughs and solving long standing problems.
- unshavedyak 7mo ago
  I'll be more likely to agree with anything being AGI if it doesn't have such obvious and common brittleness. These LLMs all go off the rails when the context window gets large. Their context is also easy to "poison", and so it's better to rollback conversations that went bad rather than trying to steer them back to the light. There's probably more examples, but to me AGI must move beyond the above issues. Though frankly context window might just be a symptom of poor harness than anything, still - it illustrates my general issue with them being considered AGI as it stands today. Claude 4.6 is getting crazy good though, i'll give you that.

interpol_p 7mo ago

I had Opus 4.6 running on a backend bug for hours. It got nowhere. Turned out the problem was in AWS X-ray swizzling the fetch method and not handling the same argument types as the original, which led to cryptic errors. I had Opus 4.6 tell me I was "seeing things wrong" when I tried to have it correct some graphical issues. It got stuck in a loop of re-introducing the same bug every hour or so in an attempt to fix the issue. I'm not disagreeing with your experience, but in my experience it is largely the same as what I had with Opus 4.5 / Codex / etc.

deleted 7mo ago
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toraway 7mo ago
Haha, reminds me of an unbelievably aggravating exchange with Codex (GPT 5.4 / High) where it was unflinchingly gaslighting me about undesired behavior still occurring after a change it made that it was adamant simply could not be happening. It started by insisting I was repeatedly making a typo and still would not budge even after I started copy/pasting the full terminal history of what I was entering and the unabridged output, and eventually pivoted to darkly insinuating I was tampering with my shell environment as if I was trying to mislead it or something. Ultimately it turned out that it forgot it was supposed to be applying the fixes to the actual server instead of the local dev environment, and had earlier in the conversation switched from editing directly over SSH to pushing/pulling the local repo to the remote due to diffs getting mangled.

Aperocky 7mo ago

I had been able to get it into the classic AI loop once. It was about a problem with calculation around filling a topographical water basin with sedimentation where calculation is discrete (e.g. turn based) and that edge case where both water and sediments would overflow the basin; To make the matter simple, fact was A, B, C, and it oscillated between explanation 1 which refuted C, explanation 2 which refuted A and explanation 3 that refuted B. I'll give it to opus training stability that my 3 tries using it all consistently got into this loop, so I decided to directly order it to do a brute force solution that avoided (but didn't solve) this problem. I did feel like with a human, there's no way that those 3 loop would happen by the second time. Or at least the majority of us. But there is just no way to get through to opus 4.6

hrishikesh-s 7mo ago

Opus-4.6 is so far ahead of the rest that I think Anthropic is the winner in winner-take-all

steve-atx-7600 7mo ago
Codex doesn't seem that far behind. I use the top model available for api key use and its gotten faster this month even on the max effort level (not like a cheetah - more like not so damn painful anymore). Plus, it also forks agents in parallel - for speed & to avoid polluting the main context. I.e. it will fork explorer agents while investigating (kind of amusing because they're named after famous scientists).

koreth1 7mo ago

I wish I had this kind of experience. I threw a tedious but straightforward task at Claude Code using Opus 4.6 late last week: find the places in a React code base where we were using useState and useEffect to calculate a value that was purely dependent on the inputs to useEffect, and replace them with useMemo. I told it to be careful to only replace cases where the change did not introduce any behavior changes, and I put it in plan mode first. It gave me an impressive plan of attack, including a reasonable way to determine which code it could safely modify. I told it to start with just a few files and let me review; its changes looked good. So I told it to proceed with the rest of the code. It made hundreds of changes, as expected (big code base). And most of them were correct! Except the places where it decided to do things like put its "const x = useMemo(...)" call after some piece of code that used the value of "x", meaning I now had a bunch of undefined variable references. There were some other missteps too. I tried to convince it to fix the places where it had messed up, but it quickly started wanting to make larger structural changes (extracting code into helper functions, etc.) rather than just moving the offending code a few lines higher in the source file. Eventually I gave up trying to steer it and, with the help of another dev on my team, fixed up all the broken code by hand. It probably still saved time compared to making all the changes myself. But it was way more frustrating.

dyauspitr 7mo ago
You’re using it wrong. As soon as it starts going off the rails once you’ve repeated yourself, you drop the whole session and start over.
- saghm 7mo ago
  One of the more subtle points that seems to be crucial is that it works a lot better when it can use the context as part of its own work rather than being polluted by unrelated details. Even better than restarting when it's off the rails is to avoid it as much as possible by proactively starting a new conversation as soon as anything in the history of the existing one stops being relevant. I've found it more effective to manually tell it most what's currently in the context in a fresh session skip the irrelevant bits even if they're fairly small than relying on it to figure out that it's no longer relevant (or give it instructions indicating that, which feels like a crapshoot whether it's actually going to prune or just bloat things further with that instruction just being added into the mix). To echo what the parent comment said, it's almost frustrating how effective it can be at certain tasks that I wouldn't ever have the patience for. At my job recently I needed to prototype calling some Python code via WASM using the Rust wasmtime engine, and setting up the code structure to have the bytes for the WASM component, the arguments I wanted to pass to the function, and the WIT describing the interface for the function, it was able to fill in all of the boilerplate needed so that the function calls worked properly within a minute or two on the first try; reading through all the documentation and figuring out how exactly which half dozen assorted things I had to import and hook up together in the correct order would have probably taken me an hour at minimum. I don't have any particular insight on whether or not these tools will become even more powerful over time, and I still have fairly strong concerns about how AI tools will affect society (both in terms of how they're used and the amount of in energy used to produce them in the first place), but given how much the tech industry tends to prioritize productivity over social concerns, I have to assume that my future employment is going to be heavily impacted by my willingness to adopt and use these tools. I can't deny at this point that having it as an option would make me more productive than if I refuse to use it, regardless of my personal opinions on it.

sarchertech 7mo ago

What kinds of things are you building? This is not my experience at all. Just today I asked Claude using opus 4.6 to build out a test harness for a new dynamic database diff tool. Everything seemed to be fine but it built a test suite for an existing diff tool. It set everything up in the new directory, but it was actually testing code and logic from a preexisting directory despite the plan being correct before I told it to execute. I started over and wrote out a few skeleton functions myself then asked it write tests for those to test for some new functionality. Then my plan was to the ask it to add that functionality using the tests as guardrails. Well the tests didn’t actually call any of the functions under test. They just directly implemented the logic I asked for in the tests. After $50 and 2 hours I finally got something working only to realize that instead of creating a new pg database to test against, it found a dev database I had lying around and started adding tables to it. When I managed to fix that, it decided that it needed to rebuild multiple docker components before each test and test them down after each one. After about 4 hours and $75, I managed to get something working that was probably more code than I would have written in 4 hours, but I think it was probably worse than what I would have come up with on my own. And I really have no idea if it works because the day was over and I didn’t have the energy left to review it all. We’ve recently been tasked at work with spending more money on Claude (not being more productive the metric is literally spending more money) and everyone is struggling to do anything like what the posts on HN say they are doing. So far no one in my org in a very large tech company has managed to do anything very impressive with Claude other than bringing down prod 2 days ago. Yes I’m using planning mode and clearing context and being specific with requirements and starting new sessions, and every other piece of advice I’ve read. I’ve had much more luck using opus 4.6 in vs studio to make more targeted changes, explain things, debug etc… Claude seems too hard to wrangle and it isn’t good enough for you to be operating that far removed from the code.

dcre 7mo ago
Curious what language and stack. And have people at your company had marginally more success with greenfield projects like prototypes? I guess that’s what you’re describing, though it sounds like it’s a directory in a monorepo maybe?

vips7L 7mo ago

Bullshit.

phendrenad2 7mo ago

The replies to this really make me think that some people are getting left behind the AI age. Colleges are likely already teaching how to prompt, but a lot of existing software devs just don't get it. I encourage people who aren't having success with AI to watch some youtube videos on best practices.

germinalphrase 7mo ago
Share one
- phendrenad2 7mo ago
  Okay the process is simple. You're going to go to another website, called YouTube. Don't be alarmed. First read all the steps so you don't miss any, once you start going to the other site you won't be able to see this one. You might want to write these down on a piece of paper first. Okay here we go: 1. Click in the bar at the top of the page that says ycombinator.com 2. type this in: youtube.com 3. press enter 4. There will be a box at the top that says "search", click that 5. type in "tips and tricks for agentic coding" 6. press enter 7. a list of videos should appear, watch them all
  - arcanemachiner 7mo ago
    But what if they find a bad one? There's a lot of junk out there.
    - phendrenad2 7mo ago
      Yes, this can happen. Some people just have the worst luck, and will always find the bad one. This is why Greene made "stay away from unlucky people" law 10 out of 48. It's really that important.
namtab00 7mo ago
I am such a dev (backend). I'm working in a codebase of 200+ "microservices", separate repos, each deployed as multiple FaaS, CQRS-style. None of it my choice, everything precedes me, many repos I know nothing of. Little to no code re-use between them. Any trace of "business logic" is so distributed in multiple repos, that I have no possible use of LLM codegen, unless I can somehow feed it ALL the codebase. I've tried generating some tests, but they always miss the mark, as in the system under test is almost always the wrong one. I guess LLM are cool for greenfield, but when the brownfield is really brown, there's no use for LLMs.

scroogey 7mo ago

Just yesterday I asked it to repeat a very simple task 10 times. It ended up doing it 15 times. It wasn't a problem per se, just a bit jarring that it was unable to follow such simple instructions (it even repeated my desire for 10 repetitions at the start!).

raincole 7mo ago

It's so far the best model that answers my questions about Wolfram language. That being said it's the only use case for me. I won't subscribe to something that I can't use with third party harness.

copperx 7mo ago
I use a Claude sub with oh-my-pi, but I do so with lots of anxiety, knowing that I will be banned at any moment.

eknkc 7mo ago

I find that Opus misses a lot of details in the code base when I want it to design a feature or something. It jumps to a basic solution which is actually good but might affect something elsewhere. GPT 5.4 on codex cli has been much more reliable for me lately. I used to have opus write and codex review, I now to the opposite (I actually have codex write and both review in parallel). So on the latest models for my use case gpt > opus but these change all the time. Edit: also the harness is shit. Claude code has been slow, weird and a resource hog. Refuses to read now standardized .agents dirs so I need symlink gymnastics. Hides as much info as it can… Codex cli is working much better lately.

toraway 7mo ago
Codex CLI is so much more pleasant to use than CC. I cancelled my CC subscription after the OpenCode thing, but somewhat ironically have recently found myself naturally trying the native Codex CLI client first more often over OpenCode. Kinda funny how you don't actually need to use coercion if you put in the engineering work to build a product that's competitive on its own technical merits...

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fbrncci 7mo ago

I am starting to believe it’s not OPUS but developers getting better at using LLMs across the board. And not realizing they are just getting much better at using these tools. I also thought it was OPUS 4.5 (also tested a lot with 4.6) and then in February switched to only using auto mode in the coding IDEs. They do not use OPUS (most of the times), and I’m ending up with a similar result after a very rough learning curve. Now switching back to OPUS I notice that I get more out of it, but it’s no longer a huge difference. In a lot of cases OPUS is actually in the way after learning to prompt more effectively with cheaper models. The big difference now is that I’m just paying 60-90$ month for 40-50hrs of weekly usage… while I was inching towards 1000$ with OPUS. I chose these auto modes because they don’t dig into usage based pricing or throttling which is a pretty sweet deal.

copperx 7mo ago
I had similar thoughts regarding "we are simply getting better at using them", but the man I tried Gemini again and reconsidered.
danielbln 7mo ago
Opus is not an acronym.
- devld 7mo ago
  O.P.U.S OutProgram U Soon
- fbrncci 7mo ago
  I know, but its certainly a new paradigm.

olalonde 7mo ago

> PRD Is it Baader-Meinhof or is everyone on HN suddenly using obscure acronyms?

shujito 7mo ago
It stands for Product Requirements Document, it is something commonly used in project planning and management.
- epicureanideal 7mo ago
  Maybe so, but personally it seemed to be referred to as a "specification" or "spec" for a long time, and then suddenly around maybe 5 years ago I started to hear people use "PRD". I'm not sure what caused the change.
  - olalonde 7mo ago
    Yep, software specs or requirements[0]. Thanks to LLMs it's easy to look up acronyms, but still, it feels like there's an uptick of them on HN[1]... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_requirements_specification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_requirements_specific... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323316 who the hell knows that version of "RSI"?
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nvarsj 7mo ago
Seems commonly used in Big Tech - first time I heard it was in my current job. Now it's seared into my brain since it's used so much. Among many other acronyms which I won't bore you with.

ai_fry_ur_brain 7mo ago

Im convinced everyone saying this is building the simplest web apps, and doing magic tricks on themselves.

raldi 7mo ago
What evidence would convince you otherwise?
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 7mo ago
  Session dumps would be nice.
hparadiz 7mo ago
I've been building a new task manager in C for Linux. If you're not using AI you are cooked. You just don't realize it yet. https://i.imgur.com/YXLZvy3.png https://i.imgur.com/YXLZvy3.png
- popcorncowboy 7mo ago
  > If you're not using AI you are cooked. You just don't realize it yet. Truth. But not just “using”. Because here’s where this ship has already landed: humans will not write code, humans will not review code. I see mostly rage against this idea, but it is already here. Resistance is futile. There will be no “hand crafted software” shops. You have at most 3-4 years left if you think this is your job.
  - hparadiz 7mo ago
    I don't really agree. People should still understand the code because sometimes the AI solution really is wrong and I have to shove my hand in it's guts and force it to use my solution or even explain the reasoning. People should be studying architecture. Cause now I can orchestrate stuff that used to take teams and I would throwaway as a non-viable idea. Now I can just do it. But no you will still be reviewing code.

fooker 7mo ago

I have a PhD in a niche field and this can do my job ;) Not sure if this means I should get a more interesting job or if we are all going to be at the mercy of UBI eventually.

suzzer99 7mo ago
We're never getting UBI. See the latest interview with the Palantir CEO where he talks about white collar workers having to take more hands-on jobs that they may not feel as satisfied with. IE - tending their manors and compounds. RIP widespread middle class. It was a good 80-year run.
- fooker 7mo ago
  I wonder if we are going to find more creative solutions.
_heimdall 7mo ago
An economy, and likely a society, fails if everyone is at the mercy of a UBI.
- copperx 7mo ago
  But what's the alternative? Can any economy succeed with a >50% unemployment rate?
  - _heimdall 7mo ago
    Don't confuse UBI and employment or even income though. If we find ourselves replacing or exceeding current productivity without humans working in the system we have to fundamentally rethink our system. You likely wouldn't need money at all in that future, for example. What does the money really mean when everyone I'd guaranteed to have all the basics covered? Is money really helping to store value created via labor when there is no labor? And is money providing price discover when the cost of resources and manufacturing are moving towards zero? If labor is replaced with tech, and I think that's a big if, I don't see any outcome other than a totalitarian distopia that will fail much like the Soviet Union.

wetpaws 7mo ago

[dead]

gregharned 7mo ago

[flagged]

edot 7mo ago
LLM written comments are not allowed on HN. This comment is written by an LLM and the account is fresh.

schainks 7mo ago

> It was also the first AI I felt, "Damn, this thing is smarter than me." 1000% agree. It's also easy to talk to it about something you're not sure it said and derive a better, more elegant solution with simple questioning. Gemini 3.1 also gives me these vibes.

ed_elliott_asc 7mo ago

It’s still pretty poor writing powershell

rafaelmn 7mo ago

I've seen a few instances of where Claude showed me a better way to do something and many many more instances of where it fails miserably. Super simple problem : I had a ZMK keyboard layout definition I wanted it to convert it to QMK for a different keyboard that had one key less so it just had to trim one outer key. It took like 45 minutes of back and forth to get it right - I could have done it in 30 min manually tops with looking up docs for everything. Capability isn't the impressive part it's the tenacity/endurance.

marginalia_nu 7mo ago

My experience is that it gets you 80-90% of the way at 20x the speed, but coaxing it into fixing the remaining 10-20% happens at a staggeringly slow speed. All programming is like this to some extent, but Claude's 80/20 behavior is so much more extreme. It can almost build anything in 15-30 minutes, but after those 15-30 minutes are up, it's only "almost built". Then you need to spend hours, days, maybe even weeks getting past the "almost". Big part of why everyone seems to be vibe coding apps, but almost nobody seems to be shipping anything.

devld 7mo ago

But does it still generate slop? I'm late to the party and I'm just getting started with Antrophic models. I have been finding Sonnet decent enough, but it seems to have trouble naming variables correctly (it's not just that most names are poor and undescriptive, sometimes it names it wrong, confusing) or sometimes unnecessarily declaring, re-declaring variables, encoding, decoding, rather than using the value that's already there etc. Is Opus better at this?

arcanemachiner 7mo ago
You really need to try it for yourself. People working in different domains get wildly different results.

slopinthebag 7mo ago

> It was also the first AI I felt, "Damn, this thing is smarter than me." Sounds like it is.