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Comment by ivanech

3 days ago

I find Opus 4.5 very, very strong at matching the prevailing conventions/idioms/abstractions in a large, established codebase. But I guess I'm quite sensitive to this kind of thing so I explicitly ask Opus 4.5 to read adjacent code which is perhaps why it does it so well. All it takes is a sentence or two, though.

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ivanech

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falkensmaize  2 days ago

I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. Today I tried to get it to upgrade Nx, yarn and some resolutions in a typescript monorepo with about 20 apps at work (Opus 4.5 through Kiro) and it just…couldn’t do it. It hit some snags with some of the configuration changes required by the upgrade and resorted to trying to make unwanted changes to get it to build correctly. I would have thought that’s something it could hit out of the park. I finally gave up and just looked at the docs and some stack overflow and fixed it myself. I had to correct it a few times about correct config params too. It kept imagining config options that weren’t valid.

tac19  2 days ago

> ask Opus 4.5 to read adjacent code which is perhaps why it does it so well. All it takes is a sentence or two, though.

People keep telling me that an LLM is not intelligence, it's simply spitting out statistically relevant tokens. But surely it takes intelligence to understand (and actually execute!) the request to "read adjacent code".

  • latentsea  2 days ago

    I used to agree with this stance, but lately I'm more in the "LLMs are just fancy autocomplete" camp. They can just autocomplete increasingly more things, and when they can't, they fail in ways that an intelligent being just wouldn't. Rather that just output a wrong or useless autocompletion.

    • tac19  2 days ago

      They're not an equivalent intelligence as human's and thus have noticeably different failure modes. But human's fail in ways that they don't (eg. being unable to match llm's breadth and depth of knowledge)

      But the question i'm really asking is... isn't it more than a sheer statistical "trick" if an LLM can actually be instructed to "read surrounding code", understand the request, and demonstrably include it in its operation? You can't do that unless you actually understand what "surrounding code" is, and more importantly have a way to comply with the request...