Comment by ryandrake
3 days ago
This 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.
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".
> 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.
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.
and with types, it makes it easier for rounds of agents to pick up mistakes at compile time, statically. linting and sanity checking untyped languages only goes so far. I've not seen LLM's one shot perl style regexes. and javascript can still have ugly runtime WTFs
I've found this too.
I find I'm doing more Typescript projects than Python because of the superior typing, despite the fact I prefer Python.
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`
Hah! I actually initiated the project because I'm a long time XBMC/Kodi user. I started using it when it was called XBMC, on an actual Xbox 1. I am sick and tired of its crashing, poor playback performance, and increasingly bloated feature set. It's embarrassing when I have friends or family over for movie night, and I have to explain "Sorry folks, Kodi froze midway through the movie again" while I frantically try to re-launch/reboot my way back to watching the movie. VLC's playback engine is much better but the VLC app's TV UX is ass. This application actually uses the libVLC playback engine under the hood.
I think anecdotes like this may prove very relevant the next few years. AI might make bad code, but a project of bad code that's still way smaller than a bloated alternative, and has a UX tailored to your exact requirements could be compelling.
A big part of the problem with existing software is that humans seem to be pretty much incapable of deciding a project is done and stop adding to it. We treat creating code like a job or hobby instead of a tool. Nothing wrong with that, unless you're advertising it as a tool.
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Have you tried VidHub? Works nicely against almost anything. Plex, jellyfin, smb/webdav folder etc
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?
By tomorrow the app will be replaced with a new version from the other competitor, by that time the memory leak will not reveal itself
Part of the "one day" development time was exhaustively testing it. Since the tool's scope is so small, getting good test coverage was pretty easy. Of course, I'm not guaranteeing through formal verification methods that the code is bug free. I did find bugs, but they were all areas that were poorly specified by me in the requirements.
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
> At work I only have access to calude using the GitHub copilot integration so this could be the cause of my problems.
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.
Vs code copilot extension the harness is not great, but Opus 4.5 with Copilot CLI works quite well.
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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
Ah, but you’re at the beginning stage young grasshopper. Soon you will be missing that horizontal ultra wide monitor as you spin up 8 different Claude agents in parallel seasons.
oh I noticed! I've begun doing that on my laptop. I just started going down all my list of sideprojects one by one, then two by two, a Claude Code instance in a terminal window for each folder. It's a bit mental
I'm finding that branding and graphic design is the most arduous part, that I'm hoping to accelerate soon. I'm heavily AI assisted there too and I'm evaluating MCP servers to help, but so far I do actually have to focus on just that part as opposed to babysit
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.
The AI bubble is kind of like the dot-com bubble in that it's a revolutionary technology that will certainly be a huge part of the future, but it's still overhyped (i.e. people are investing without regard for logic).
We were enjoying cheap second hand rack mount servers, RAM, hard drives, printers, office chairs and so on for a decade after the original dot com crash. Every company that went out of business liquidated their good shit for pennies.
I'm hoping after AI comes back down to earth there will be a new glut of cheap second hand GPUs and RAM to get snapped up.
Right. And same for railways, which had a huge bubble early on. Over-hyped on the short time horizon. Long term, they were transformative in the end, although most of the early companies and early investors didn’t reap the eventual profits.
But the dot-com bubble wasn't overhyed in retrospect. It was under-hyped.
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> 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.
What exactly does it say, in your opinion? I can imagine 4-5 different takes on that post.
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