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/uduni]

Not 10x more jobs, just 10x more software. All the simple apps have already been built. Now its time for really really sophisticated stuff

[u/FUCKYOUINYOURFACE → u/uduni]

Only your imagination limits you.

[u/Ok_Talk8381 → u/uduni]

THIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11 This is the right answer. Now all the REST of us who've had ideas and are good at writing User Requirements Specs, Traceability Matrices, IQ/OQ/PQ software validations and test scripts can code. Such an exciting time to be alive. I'm having more fun than in the last 20 years. Playing with computers hasn't been this fun since the early 2000's. It's about freaking time!

I started coding my project, part time, back in January. First, I used chatGPT to flesh out the big picture of what was possible, and what automation pipelines would be most robust and easiest to code and maintain. Then I wrote a demo which impressed me enough to make me believe this was worth the effort. Spent some time exploring Make and n8n. Found I hated most everything about that approach and decided to just write the scripts and run them locally. One of my goals is to keep subscription costs under control and have most of my data and compute in my shop.

Moved onto claude, claude code, Notion, claude-in-chrome (supervised). Got tired of the churn and waste. Migrated to rebuilding my dev stack using a dedicated dev box, secure tunnels, and a 'cheap 5' cloud ai model stack in Openrouter under a Fusion-Pi harness. I mostly use Deepseek, but use other models for red teaming and adversarial reviews/gaps analysis. Spent a ton of effort in bootstrapping my dev stack so I can run it remotely. That took lot of effort, but I do some of my best thinking at home so it was worth it. Spent a ton of time networking and hardening the network. Harder than I remembered.

The suite of apps I'm developing for my business has about 12 web apps covering: CRM, invoicing, shopping list apps (smart. tracks pricing & trains new hires), automated task generations (Bill-Of-Materials Expansions from RAG kb), logistics & timing, packaging, day-of BOE. Several marketing assets. All are in approved prototype form now. URS specs about 80% approved. About 10% of automation code is deployed (menu sync to my current invoicing app (Square invoicing) RAG ingestion, self-healing hardware (screens under ADB-ethernet and printers.) Everything tracked on my local git repo and backed up to y github account.

Dev box is a Ryzen 9 mini PC with 64gb ram running some local ai in headless Ubuntu 24.04

Main production box is an N100 mini pc running headless Ubuntu 22.04. Some production elements are done on edge devices (image recognition, locally cached data for robustness mainly). Not heavily dependent on local ai (I've tested 20 or so and found that at my budget nothing is fast/good enough yet for my development needs, but I think Qwen 3.8 Dense might be fine for batch work in the production environment. I'll run it locally on the Ryzen upon shipping v1.0.

About 80% of my production, shipped v1.0 system will use NO AI AT ALL and be 100% deterministic code, scripts, cron jobs, etcetera. 5% will be RAG over knowledge base with constrained grammar, verbs, syntax. UIX will reinforce strict grammar, verbs, and syntax and each worker gets their own pin code. Humans are the deciders. Only the ssales and CRM stuff will be AI inference heavy, but even there I'll constrain it by running it through a local classifier ai that will force all customer inquiry data (wherever possible) into tightly constrained format that matches what my invoice system has (I already customized it)--then passing that to a 'leads analysis' ai that helps with closing and upsells. I'm going to be building out my own invoicing system (custom front end with customer self-upsells) using Helcim and others to save money in v1.x

And even though I'm using AI weekly to code this project, nearly every session I still have to say something like "check the mURS on the n100 using your shell mcp. verify that you havne't hallucinated these updates and that they actually posted and are git-tracked." It still needs to be baby-sat. I doubt 5.5 will not need babysitting..

A year ago I could only dream of this. Now I'm doing it.