Comment by comex
9 hours ago
My experience is that even Opus 5 still tends to write buggy or low-quality code and makes serious mistakes when analyzing code. It's a lot better than before but still not something I trust. I've had less experience with Fable since I can't use it at work; I hear it's a step up but still has its limits.
For large tasks like a web browser or a compiler, even expensive swarms of frontier LLMs have not been shown capable of producing codebases that actually work. (Anthropic built a C compiler with Opus 4.6 but it lacked optimizations and apparently hit a complexity wall.)
I also want to use LLMs for reverse engineering, but apparently it's pretty hit-or-miss, especially if you're forced to use open-source models to avoid restrictions.
This reply is particularly interesting to me because most of my experience with actually using LLMs to get work done is with coding agents. But I only have a fairly narrow set of experiences: two pretty large solo Flutter projects. I am currently really pleased with Gemini as a coding agent. It could improve, but I think improvements are going to come from marginal gains in the harness and training material so it can catch things like misconfigured permissions in platform specific areas.
It's also interesting because, while coding agents are important and are a notable success, they are never going to be a multi trillion dollar business. And are there any other domains where LLMs have such a large impact?