alt Hacker NewsYou can absolutely spot people that aren’t using the latest models personally because they succeed in clinging to notions that doing so would dispel in three seconds.
Opus 5.5 produces code far better than 95% of professional devs, and it only stands to get “worse” from here on out.
Quite where this leaves any of the people in these information processing jobs is anyone’s guess.
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Opus makes boneheaded mistakes and engages in severe anti-patterns constantly. I use it, but it requires careful handholding on complex projects. It absolutely isn’t better than 95% of professional devs, that’s a ridiculous statement.
While this may be true Opus 5.5 still sucks at a ton of things that make being a software engineer a software engineer.
This reinforces the comparison to compilers. Modern compilers produce better assembly code than almost every human programmer. Despite that, there are way more programmers than before compilers existed.
The job of a programmer is partially to automate away the current job of a programmer, and we've been successfully riding that curve at least since the days of punch cards.
I’m not sure I agree. I’m using Fable 5.1, Opus 5.5, and Astra on a continual basis all day long professionally for software development but it’s still very much the case that the models are inclined to over-engineer and produce fairly sloppy code. Of course the ROI is outstanding and I wouldn’t go back but I still find it’s necessary to have robust sets of rules around how to write code by domain. We have DB rules and conventions, React rules and conventions, etc. which help steer output towards something sensible. I would basically never ship “out of the box code” from these models and still periodically do “slop cleanup” throughout our codebase.
I have used Opus 5.5, it is great when the shape and outcome is simple and well trodden but as soon as you ask it for something more novel it is liable to drop the ball, and leave you cleaning up the mess. I feel so gaslit by comments like this. What devs do you know that code like Opus 5.5? Are they also marvelling at its incredible output as if they’ve seen God? Maybe the tech industry needed a culling because people really be voluntarily shouting about how terrible they programmed without AI, its embarrassing.
I hear this meme of "Opus writes better code than me" repeated a lot. I am absolutely baffled by it.
I use all the latest and greatest Anthropic (and OpenAI) models, and interact with them probably on average 10h a day. I experiment with changing effort levels, with different ways of prompting and guardrailing, etc. Giving more instructions, giving less instructions. Doing heavy planning, just giving vague ideas.
I've done everything from fully vibe coding massive projects, to using LLMs regularly in my day job and reviewing every single line they produce.
Unless you are *really* on top of your agents, they inevitably end up writing an absolute mess. Not only does the code become impossible for humans to reason about very quickly, it actually becomes difficult for agents to reason about it. It turns into a total garbage in = garbage out situation.
Have you honestly reviewed a vibe coded project after it has been going for a while, even one written by current SOTA models, and thought "yep, this is great code"?