alt Hacker NewsThis was me. I was a huge AI coding detractor on here for a while (you can check my comment history). But, in order to stay informed and not just be that grouchy curmudgeon all the time, I kept up with the models and regularly tried them out. Opus 4.5 is so much better than anything I've tried before, I'm ready to change my mind about AI assistance.
I even gave -True Vibe Coding- a whirl. Yesterday, from a blank directory and text file list of requirements, I had Opus 4.5 build an Android TV video player that could read a directory over NFS, show a grid view of movie poster thumbnails, and play the selected video file on the TV. The result wasn't exactly full-featured Kodi, but it works in the emulator and actual device, it has no memory leaks, crashes, ANRs, no performance problems, no network latency bugs or anything. It was pretty astounding.
Oh, and I did this all without ever opening a single source file or even looking at the proposed code changes while Opus was doing its thing. I don't even know Kotlin and still don't know it.
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Oh, wow, that's impressive, thanks for sharing!
Going to one-up you though -- here's a literal one-liner that gets me a polished media center with beautiful interface and powerful skinning engine. It supports Android, BSD, Linux, macOS, iOS, tvOS and Windows.
`git clone https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc.git`
How do you know “it has no memory leaks, crashes, ANRs, no performance problems, no network latency bugs or anything” if you built it just yesterday? Isn’t it a bit too early for claims like this? I get it’s easy to bring ideas to life but aren’t we overly optimistic?
I decided to vibe code something myself last week at work. I've been wanting to create a poc that involves a coding agent create custom bokeh plots that a user can interact with and ask follow up questions. All this had to be served using a holoview panel library
At work I only have access to calude using the GitHub copilot integration so this could be the cause of my problems. Claude was able to get slthe first iteration up pretty quick. At that stage the app could create a plot and you could interact with it and ask follow up questions.
Then I asked it to extend the app so that it could generate multiple plots and the user could interact with all of them one at a time. It made a bunch of changes but the feature was never implemented. I asked it to do again but got the same outcome. I completely accept the fact that it could just be all because I am using vscode copilot or my promoting skills are not good but the LLM got 70% of the way there and then completely failed
I recently replaced my monitor with one that could be vertically oriented, because I'm just using Claude Code in the terminal and not looking at file trees at all
but I do want a better way to glance and keep up with what its doing in longer conversations, for my own mental context window
Thanks for posting this. It's a nice reminder that despite all the noise from hype-mongers and skeptics in the past few years, most of us here are just trying to figure this all out with an open mind and are ready to change our opinions when the facts change. And a lot of people in the industry that I respect on HN or elsewhere have changed their minds about this stuff in the last year, having previously been quite justifiably skeptical. We're not in 2023 anymore.
If you were someone saying at the start of 2025 "this is a flash in the pan and a bunch of hype, it's not going to fundamentally change how we write code", that was still a reasonable belief to hold back then. At the start of 2026 that position is basically untenable: it's just burying your head in the sand and wishing for AI to go away. If you're someone who still holds it you really really need to download Claude Code and set it to Opus and start trying it with an open mind: I don't know what else to tell you. So now the question has shifted from whether this is going to transform our profession (it is), to how exactly it's going to play out. I personally don't think we will be replacing human engineers anytime soon ("coders", maybe!), but I'm prepared to change my mind on that too if the facts change. We'll see.
I was a fellow mind-changer, although it was back around the first half of last year when Claude Code was good enough to do things for me in a mature codebase under supervision. It clearly still had a long way to go but it was at that tipping point from "not really useful" to "useful". But Opus 4.5 is something different - I don't feel I have to keep pulling it back on track in quite the way I used to with Sonnet 3.7, 4, even Sonnet 4.5.
For the record, I still think we're in a bubble. AI companies are overvalued. But that's a separate question from whether this is going to change the software development profession.
> Oh, and I did this all without ever opening a single source file or even looking at the proposed code changes while Opus was doing its thing. I don't even know Kotlin and still don't know it.
... says it all.
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I have a few Go projects now and I speak Go as well as you speak Kotlin. I predict that we'll see some languages really pull ahead of others in the next few years based on their advantages for AI-powered development.
For instance, I always respected types, but I'm too lazy to go spend hours working on types when I can just do ruby-style duck typing and get a long ways before the inevitable problems rear their head. Now, I can use a strongly typed language and get the advantages for "free".