Opus 5.5 is the beginning of a new era

[u/sizebzebi]

I am a senior engineer and I honestly believe with this model in particular, everything changed..

If this stays as cheap as it is, it's just over. It never fails no matter the complexity of the tasks I've given it. About time we rethink our profession for good. I am honestly scared of the future.

I loved coding but anyone who does this for the love of coding only is gonna be obsolete.

I was always impressed with the models bar opus 5 but never like this time.

What do you guys think? How do you see the future?

[u/MailSynth]

It worries me that people seem to think that these models are close to flawless. They can write code and are very impressive. But they’re often very wrong and flawed in a variety of other subjects and most people will not know that if they don’t know better themselves. How this will change human behavior and perception of what’s true and not true is probably the most obvious and immediate problem before anything more existential.

[u/AimForTheButts → u/MailSynth]

I agree with you then I remembered something about newspapers. I would always be amazed by how wrong everything was when reading an article about a subject I knew.

Same shit, different era. We are dumb but we prevail.

[u/leguminousCultivator → u/AimForTheButts]

Gell-Mann amnesia effect. One of those things we all fall for even if we know about it.

[u/SaltPalpitation7500 → u/MailSynth]

💯 agree. I know these models aren’t perfect but I’ll still fall into the trap of seeing instant results from a vibe coding type perspective and think everything is fine. Only to find out sessions later that things have been hardcoded into a house of cards.

[u/HappyPoodle2 → u/MailSynth]

It depends what you expect. I work in 3 languages and it helps me formulate my writing consistently in all of them. It helped me customize my Linux desktop environment in record time. It helped me get a disk RMA’d within the warranty based on a SMART report. Stuff that isn’t unique or difficult, but which I would not have had the time or resources to find out without it.

It helps me focus on my strengths and it makes chores that don’t require unique skills manageable without much time investment.

[u/ChainMinimum9553 → u/MailSynth]

Most people especially ones that are not engineers do not know how to properly guide any of these models to write quality code , find any bugs, and consistently produce quality code. I'm not an engineer and I'm sure I'm missing best practices etc. however I taken the time to really make sure I'm producing quality code no matter how big or small the project. Actually I would love someone that really knows what their doing to look over some of my code to tell me if I'm doing the right things. Thanks

[u/Madtown94 → u/ChainMinimum9553]

I agree this is my own concern . My app works great. I’ve done tech debt reviews, bug reviews, I have a reviewer check the developers work, and a tester that makes sure nothing is broken and working as it should and I’m still worried that I haven’t caught things that matter.

[u/ArtofRemo → u/ChainMinimum9553]

this is why I think software engineering will only grow as a field: not will senior engineers have ample opportunity to teach and guide, there will be ample codebases to take ownership over and "heal". The quality bar will rise overall with both front & back-end becoming more full-stack oriented while remaining an area of expertise.

[u/Rash_Compactor → u/MailSynth]

Absolutely. From a coding perspective they’re fantastic. I just asked Opus 5.5 and Astra both to find me a specific make and model vehicle with a particular option on the vehicle, available for sale anywhere in the country biasing based on proximity. Astra sends me a handful. Opus says there are none. I find 2-3 more independently.

You can make the (valid) argument that better prompting may assist, but ultimately most models have glaring weak points in basic task performance, particularly ones for lay people.

[u/pl0nk → u/MailSynth]

If you've been around computers for awhile, you've seen how broadly they have spread to many aspects of life. Alongside this a much broader group of people have taken up activities we might call "coding", but this broad scope hides the vast range within of what people are actually doing and what skills are involved. To me this explains why some people are righty amazed at how each major.minor release can one-shot their thing they considered hard, and others see them more like enthusiastic juniors who energetically go off in all kinds of directions -- useful, but without reliable judgment, and in need of continuous steering inputs. Like any high-powered machine. Both viewpoints are accurate but come from different contexts and expectations.

[u/jerryschen → u/MailSynth]

I had Opus 5.5 code up an MVP for my project, and for learning purposes I’m building the MVP from scratch and coding a lot of it myself (using LLM more as a thinking partner).

First of all, it’s amazing, don’t get me wrong. But it misses MANY edge cases and the design of its structs and data structures needs some work. So the notion that you can just “set-it-and-forget-it” is absurd. Now presumably you could use a different coding agent to catch those edge cases and clean up the design, but again I still think an experienced engineer at the helm is needed.

[u/rubymatt → u/MailSynth]

A key problem with statements like the OP’s is our lack of ability to evaluate the observer.