alt Hacker NewsOpus 4.5 has become really capable.
Not in terms of knowledge. That was already phenomenal. But in its ability to act independently: to make decisions, collaborate with me to solve problems, ask follow-up questions, write plans and actually execute them.
You have to experience it yourself on your own real problems and over the course of days or weeks.
Every coding problem I was able to define clearly enough within the limits of the context window, the chatbot could solve and these weren’t easy. It wasn’t just about writing and testing code. It also involved reverse engineering and cracking encoding-related problems. The most impressive part was how actively it worked on problems in a tight feedback loop.
In the traditional sense, I haven’t really coded privately at all in recent weeks. Instead, I’ve been guiding and directing, having it write specifications, and then refining and improving them.
Curious how this will perform in complex, large production environments.
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Just some examples I’ve already made public. More complex ones are in the pipeline. With [0], I’m trying to benchmark different coding-agents. With [1], I successfully reverse-engineered an old C64 game using Opus 4.5 only.
Yes, feel free to blame me for the fact that these aren’t very business-realistic.
I find my sweet spot is using the Claude web app as a rubber duck as well as feeding it snippets of code and letting it help me refine the specific thing I'm doing.
When I use Claude Code I find that it *can* add a tremendous amount of ability due to its ability to see my entire codebase at once, but the issue is that if I'm doing something where seeing my entire codebase would help that it blasts through my quota too fast. And if I'm tightly scoping it, it's just as easy & faster for me to use the website.
Because of this I've shifted back to the website. I find that I get more done faster that way.
> In the traditional sense, I haven’t really coded privately at all in recent weeks. Instead, I’ve been guiding and directing, having it write specifications, and then refining and improving them.
This is basically all my side projects.
This has also been my experience.
> You have to experience it yourself on your own real problems and over the course of days or weeks.
How do you stop it from over-engineering everything?