Comment by XenophileJKO
6 hours ago
Have you seen this with Opus 5.5?
I've been mostly working on very large modeling projects (think detailed architeture over 1000 acres) or animation because this really was the "new" capability area that Opus 5.5 "unlocked".
I have been surprised how well it has worked at scale with many sub-agents. However the code base is limited to the rendering engine mostly.
Certainly in the older models they hit a complexity limit, but I haven't really hit it with Opus 5.5. I have had it make data flow designs that I didn't like because they were more complicated than it should have been or the perenial problem of trying to make everything backwards compatible when working on greenfield refactors, but I haven't seen it choke on a code base yet.
Yes, I've also hit it with Opus 5.5, but on way fewer projects. My long standing projects that I marked as failed/to-soon with 4.8 have entered the grey area of slow-progress-with-handholding like smaller projects did in the past.
To my experience, it's a simple complexity curve where the first bits go fast and the speed goes down very fast once you reach a certain level of complexity. Size doesn't matter as much as complexity: with the right foundations, it keeps zooming through it. Now I do wonder how much my inexperience in the complicated project is a brake on progress vs. it just being a hard to tackle problem.
My sense is the limit is more tied to the problem than the code base size. I work in some very large code bases, but it's not an issue because the nature of the problem (think what a standard SaaS would need).
On the other hand, I have a TS only project core is sub-20k LoC (NES harness), where it is struggling (for now, see other comments)