And I get it. Coding with Claude Code really was prompting something, getting errors, and asking it to fix it. Which was still useful but I could see why a skilled coder adding a feature to a complex codebase would just give up
Opus 4.5 really is at a new tier however. It just...works. The errors are far fewer and often very minor - "careless" errors, not fundamental issues (like forgetting to add "use client" to a nextjs client component.
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.
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".
Oh absolutely. I've been using Python for past 15 or so years for everything.
I've never written a single line of Rust in my life, and all my new projects are Rust now, even the quick-script-throwaway things, because it's so much better at instantly screaming at claude when it goes off track. It may take it longer to finish what I asked it to do, but requires so much less involvement from me.
I will likely never start another new project in python ever.
EDIT: Forgot to add that paired with a good linter, this is even more impressive. I told Claude to come up with the most masochistic clippy configuration possible, where even a tiny mistake is instantly punished and exceptions have to be truly exceptional (I have another agent that verifies this each run).
I just wish there was cargo-clippy for enforcing architectural patterns.
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`
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
You really need to at least try Claude Code directly instead of using CoPilot. My work gives us access to CoPilot, Claude Code, and Codex. CoPilot isn’t close to the other more agentic products.
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
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.
... says it all.
This is what people are still doing wrong. Tools in a loop people, tools in a loop.
The agent has to have the tools to detect whatever it just created is producing errors during linting/testing/running. When it can do that, I can loop again, fix the error and again - use the tools to see whether it worked.
I _still_ encounter people who think "AI programming" is pasting stuff into ChatGPT on the browser and they complain it hallucinates functions and produces invalid code.
Well, d'oh.
I was having Opus investigate it and I kept building and deploying the firmware for testing.. then I just figured I'd explain how it could do the same and pull the logs.
Off it went, for the next ~15 minutes it would flash the firmware multiple times until it figured out the issue and fixed it.
There was something so interesting about seeing a microcontroller on the desk being flashed by Claude Code, with LEDs blinking indicating failure states. There's something about it not being just code on your laptop that felt so interesting to me.
But I agree, absolutely, red/green test or have a way of validating (linting, testing, whatever it is) and explain the end-to-end loop, then the agent is able to work much faster without being blocked by you multiple times along the way.
While Claude is amazing at writing code, it still requires human operators. And even experienced human operators are bad at operating this machinery.
Tell your average joe - the one who thinks they can create software without engineers - what "tools-in-a-loop" means, and they'll make the same face they made when you tried explaining iterators to them, before LLMs.
Explain to them how typing system, E2E or integration test helps the agent, and suddenly, they now have to learn all the things they would be required to learn to be able to write on their own.
My team is using it with Claude Code and say it works brilliantly, so I'll be giving it another go.
How much of the value comes from Opus 4.5, how much comes from Claude Code, and how much comes from the combination?
Copilot has by far the best and most intuitive agent UI. Just make sure you're in agent mode and choose Sonnet or Opus models.
I've just cancelled my Claude sub and gone back and will upgrade to the GH Pro+ to get more sonnet/opus.
The gap didn't seem big, but in November (which admittedly was when Opus 4.5 was in preview on Copilot) Opus 4.5 with Copilot was awful.
It's an opportunity, not a problem. Because it means there's a gap in your specifications and then your tests.
I use Aider not Claude but I run it with Anthropic models. And what I found is that comprehensively writing up the documentation for a feature spec style before starting eliminates a huge amount of what you're referring to. It serves a triple purpose (a) you get the documentation, (b) you guide the AI and (c) it's surprising how often this helps to refine the feature itself. Sometimes I invoke the AI to help me write the spec as well, asking it to prompt for areas where clarification is needed etc.
With the latest models if you're clear enough with your requirements you'll usually find it does the right thing on the first try.
1) There exists a threshold, only identifiable in retrospect, past which it would have been faster to locate or write the code yourself than to navigate the LLM's correction loop or otherwise ensure one-shot success.
2) The intuition and motivations of LLMs derive from a latent space that the LLM cannot actually access. I cannot get a reliable answer on why the LLM chose the approaches it did; it can only retroactively confabulate. Unlike human developers who can recall off-hand, or at least review associated tickets and meeting notes to jog their memory. The LLM prompter always documenting sufficiently to bridge this LLM provenance gap hits rub #1.
3) Gradually building prompt dependency where one's ability to take over from the LLM declines and one can no longer answer questions or develop at the same velocity themselves.
4) My development costs increasingly being determined by the AI labs and hardware vendors they partner with. Particularly when the former will need to increase prices dramatically over the coming years to break even with even 2025 economics.
That's great that this is your experience, but it's not a lot of people's. There are projects where it's just not going to know what to do.
I'm working in a web framework that is a Frankenstein-ing of Laravel and October CMS. It's so easy for the agent to get confused because, even when I tell it this is a different framework, it sees things that look like Laravel or October CMS and suggests solutions that are only for those frameworks. So there's constant made up methods and getting stuck in loops.
The documentation is terrible, you just have to read the code. Which, despite what people say, Cursor is terrible at, because embeddings are not a real way to read a codebase.
There's a lesser chance that you're working on a code base that Claude Code just isn't capable of helping with.
It's not just the deficiencies of earlier versions, but the mismatch between the praise from AI enthusiasts and the reality.
I mean maybe it is really different now and I should definitely try uploading all of my employer's IP on Claude's cloud and see how well it works. But so many people were as hyped by GPT-4 as they are now, despite GPT-4 actually being underwhelming.
Too much hype for disappointing results leads to skepticism later on, even when the product has improved.
The funny part about rapidly changing industries is that, despite the fomo, there's honestly not any reward to keeping up unless you want to be a consultant. Otherwise, wait and see what sticks. If this summer people are still citing the Opus 4.5 was a game changing moment and have solid, repeatable workflows, then I'll happily change up my workflow.
Someone could walk into the LLM space today and wouldn't be significantly at a loss for not having paid attention to anything that had happened in the last 4 years other than learning what has stuck since then.
Right or wrong - doesn’t matter. You typed in a line of text and now your computer is making 3000 word stories, images, even videos based on it
How are you NOT astounded by that? We used to have NONE of this even 4 years ago!
Literally tried it yesterday. I didn't see a single difference with whatever model Claude Code was using two months ago. Same crippled context window. Same "I'll read 10 irrelevant lines from a file", same random changes etc.
Create a markdown document of your task (or use CLAUDE.md), put it in "plan mode" which allows Claude to use tool calls to ask questions before it generates the plan.
When it finishes one part of the plan, have it create a another markdown document - "progress.md" or whatever with the whole plan and what is completed at that point.
Type /clear (no more context window), tell Claude to read the two documents.
Repeat until even a massive project is complete - with those 2 markdown documents and no context window issues.
... Proceeds to explain how it's crippled and all the workarounds you have to do to make it less crippled.
Yup. There's some magical "right context" that will fix all the problems. What is that right context? No idea, I guess I need to read a yet-another 20 000-word post describing magical incantations that you should or shouldn't do in the context.
The "Opus 4.5 is something else/nex tier/just works" claims in my mind means that I wouldn't need to babysit its every decision, or that it would actually read relevant lines from relevant files etc. Nope. Exact same behaviors as whatever the previous model was.
Oh, and that "200k tokens context window"? It's a lie. The quality quickly degrades as soon as Claude reaches somewhere around 50% of the context window. At 80+% it's nearly indistinguishable from a model from two years ago. (BTW, same for Codex/GPT with it's "1 million token window")
2. It's the same workarounds we've been doing forever
3. It's indistinguishable from "clear context and re-feed the entire world of relevant info from scratch" we've had forever, just slightly more automated
That's why I don't understand all the "it's new tier" etc. It's all the same issues with all the same workarounds.
Are you sure you're not an LLM?
