I used claude code for a while in the summer, took a vacation from LLMs and I'm trying it out again now. I've heard the same thing about Opus 4.5, but my experience with claude code so far is the same as it was this summer... I guess if you're a casual user don't get too excited?
Remember when GPT-3 came out and everybody collectively freaked the hell out? That's how I've felt watching the reaction to any of the new model releases lately that make any progress.
I'm honestly not complaining about the model releases, though. Despite their shortcomings, they are extremely useful. I've found Gemini 3 to be an extremely useful learning aid, so as long as I don't blindly trust its output, and if you're trying to learn, you really ought not do that anyways. (Despite what people and benchmarks say, I've already caught some random hallucinations, it still feels like you're likely to run into hallucinations on a regular basis. Not a huge problem, but, you know.)
There are still a few things missing from all models: taste, shame and ambition.
Yes they can write code, but they have no idea what needs does that code solve, what a good UX looks like and what not to ship. Not to mention that they all eventually go down rabbit holes of imaginary problems that cannot be solve (because they’re not real), and do where they will spend eternity unless w human says stop it right now.
I've mainly been using Sonnet 4.5 so decided to give Opus 4.5 a whirl to see if could solve an annoying task I've been working on that Sonnet 4.5 absolutely fails on. Just started with "Are you familiar with <task> and can you help me?" and so far the response has been a resounding:
> Taking longer than usual. Trying again shortly (attempt 1 of 10)
> ...
> Taking longer than usual. Trying again shortly (attempt 10 of 10)
> Due to unexpected capacity constraints, Claude is unable to respond to your message. Please try again soon.
I guess I'll have to wait until later to feel the fear...
Almost every single post on the ClaudeAI subreddit is like this. I use Opus 4.5 in my day to day work life and it has quickly become my main axe for agentic stuff but its output is not a world-shattering divergence from Anthropic's previous, also great iterations. The religious zealotry I see with these things is something else.
I suspect that recurring visitors of that subreddit may not be the greatest IT professionals, but a mixture of juniors (even those with 20 years of experience but still junior) and vibe coders.
Otherwise, with all due respect, there's very little of value to learn in that subreddit.
In threads where I see an example of what the author is impressed by, I'm usually not impressed. So when I see something like this, where the author doesn't give any examples, I also assume Claude did something unimpressive.
I used Claude Code to write a relatively complicated watchOS app. I know how to program (FAANG L5), but didn't really know Swift. I achieved a pretty good result for about $600, while a contractor would've cost much more.
Good question. I left my job to start something on my own so an AI help is really nice. Should note that AI does make many boneheaded mistakes, and I have to solve some of the harder problems on my own.
It definitely feels like a jump in capability. I've found that the long term quality of the codebase doesn't take nosedive nearly as quickly as earlier agentic models. If anything it's about steady or maybe even increasing if you prompt it correctly and ask for "cleanup PRs"
For me it‘s the opposite. I do have a good feeling what I want to achieve, but translating this into and testing program code has always been causing me outright physical pain (and in case of C++ I really hate it). I‘ve been programming since age 10. Almost 40 years. And it feels like liberation.
It brings the “what to build“ question front and center while “how to build it“ has become much, much easier and more productive
Indeed. I still use AI for my side projects, but strictly limit to discussion only, no code. Otherwise what is the point? The good thing about programming is, unlike playing chess, there is no real "win/lose" in the scenario so I won't feel discouraged even if AI can do all the work by itself.
Same thing for science. I don't mind if AI could solve all those problems, as long as they can teach me. Those problems are already "solved" by the universe anyway.
Even the discussion side has been pretty meh in my mind. I was looking into a bug in a codebase filled with Claude output and for funsies decided to ask Claude about it. It basically generated a "This thing here could be a problem but there is manual validation for it" response, and when I looked, that manual validation were nowhere to be found.
There's so much half-working AI-generated code everywhere that I'd feel ashamed if I had to ever meet our customers.
I think the thing that gives me the most value is code review. So basically I first review my code myself, then have Claude review it and then submit for someone else to approve.
I don't discuss actual code with ChatGPT, just concepts. Like "if I have an issue and my algo looks like this, how can I debug it effectively in gdb?", or "how do I reduce lock contention if I have to satisfy A/B/...".
Maybe it's just because my side projects are fairly elementary.
And I agree that AI is pretty good at code review, especially if the code contains complex business logic.
something in the back of my head tells me that automating (partial) intelligence feels different than automating a small to medium scope task, maybe i'm wrong though
The commonality of people working on AI is that they ALL know software. They make a product that solves the thing that they know how to solve best.
If all lawyers knew how to write code, we’d seem more legal AI startups. But lawyers and coders are not a common overlap, surely nowhere as near as SWEs and coders.
Dario Amodei claimed "AI will replace 90% of developers within 6 months" about a year ago. Still they are just loosing money and will probably will be forever while just producing more slop code that needs even more devs to fix it.
Good job AI fanboys and girls. You will be remembered when this fake hype is over.
I'm more of a doomsayer than a fan boy. But I think it's more like "AI will replace 50% of your juniors and 25% of your seniors and perhaps 50% of your do-nothing middle managers", And that's a fairly large number anyway.
That’s only tangentially related but I have a very hard time using Opus for anything serious. Sonnet is still much more useful to me thanks to the context window size. By the moment Opus actually understands what’s needed, I’m n compactions deep and pretty much hoping for the best.
That’s a reason why I can’t believe the benchmarks and why I also believe open source models (claiming 200 but realistically struggling past 40k) aren’t only a bit but very far behind SOTA in actual software dev.
This is not true for all software, but there are types of systems or environments where it’s abundantly clear that Opus (or anything with a sub 1m window) won’t cut it, unless it has a very efficient agentic system to help.
I’m not talking about dumping an entire code base in the context, I’m talking about clear specs, some code, library guidelines, and a few elements to allow the LLM to be better than a glorified autocomplete that lives in an electron fork.
It's just a normal Reddit account which was dormant until two weeks ago when it suddenly started spamming threads exclusively about AIs imminent destruction of the job market. Nothing to see here!
I've been using Claude Code + Opus for side projects. The only thing that's changed for me dev wise is that I QA more, and think more about how to solve my problems.
It's almost vindication for where I work an SDE needs to do everything, infra, development, deployment, launch, operations. There's no dedicated QA, test or operations on a product level, and while AI helped a great deal it's pretty clear it cannot replace me at least within the next 2 to 3 iterations.
If I was only writing code, the fear would be completely justified.
Same here. Using it this week and on Thursday I began to understand why Lee Sedol retired not long after being defeated by AlphaGo. For the stuff I'm good at, 3 months ago I was better than the models. Today, I'm not sure.
It's a Misanthropic propaganda forum. They even have Claude agree in the summary of the bot comments:
"The overwhelming consensus in this thread is that OP's fear is justified and Opus represents a terrifying leap in capability. The discussion isn't about if disruption is coming, but how severe it will be and who will survive."
My fellow Romans, I come here not to discuss disruption, but to survive!
Not sure I’d be worried for my job, but it’s legitimately a significant jump in capabilities, even if other models attempt to fudge higher bench results
> do not know what's coming for us in the next 2-3 years, hell, even next year might be the final turning point already.
What is this based on? Research? Data? Gut feeling?
> but how long will it be until even that is not needed anymore?
You just answered that. 2 to 3 years, hell, even next year, maybe.
> it also saddens me knowing where all of this is heading.
If you know where this is heading why are you not investing everything you have in these companies? Isn't that the obvious conclusion instead of wringing your hands over the loss of a coding job?
It invents a problem, provides a time line, immediately questions itself, and then confidently prognosticates without any effort to explain the information used to arrive at this conclusion.
What am I supposed to take from this? Other than that people are generally irrational when contemplating the future?
We have reached the "singularity of marketing". It's what happens when an AI model has surpassed human marketers and traditional bot farms and can be used to do its own astroturfing. And then with the investment frenzy it generates, we can build the next generation of advertising intelligence and achieve infinite valuation!
Honeslty I have a lot of friends who are studying SWE and they are saying the same thing do you guys think that if they do get replaced they'll still be needed to maintin the AI's.
> Sure, I can watch Opus do my work all day long and make sure to intervene if it fucks up here and there, but how long will it be until even that is not needed anymore?
Right: if you expect your job as a software developer to be effectively the same shape on a year or two you're in for a bad time.
But humans can adapt! Your goal should be to evolve with the tools that are available. In a couple of years time you should be able to produce significantly more, better code, solving more ambitious profiles and making you more valuable as a software professional.
That's how careers have always progressed: I'm a better, faster developer today than I was two years ago.
I'll worry for my career when I meet a company that has a software roadmap that they can feasibly complete.
I just wanted to say I think it is doing people a great disservice to advocate for these specific kinds of tools, but the last paragraph is a universally correct statement, seemingly permanently.
Something doesn't square about this picture: either this is the best thing since sliced bread and it should be wildly profitable, or ... it's not, and it's losing a lot of money because they know there isn't a market at a breakeven price.
They're losing money because they are in a training arms race. If other companies weren't training competitive models OpenAI would be making a ton of money by now.
They have several billion dollars of annual revenue already.
I think it's also a cultural thing... I mean it takes time for companies and professionals to get used to the idea that it makes sense to pay hundreds of dollars per month to use an AI. That that expense (that for some is relatively affordable and for other can be a serious one) actually converts in much higher productivity or quality.
Google is always going to be training a new model and are doing so while profitable.
If OpenAI is only going to be profitable (aka has an actual business model) if other companies aren't training a competitive model, then they are toast. Which is my point. They are toast.
It feels like every model release has its own little hype cycle. Apparently Claude 4.5 is still climbing to its peak of inflated expectations.
There's lots of overlap between the cryptocurrency space and AI grifter hypeman space. And the economic incentives at play throw fuel on the fire.
They behave like televangelists
I used claude code for a while in the summer, took a vacation from LLMs and I'm trying it out again now. I've heard the same thing about Opus 4.5, but my experience with claude code so far is the same as it was this summer... I guess if you're a casual user don't get too excited?
Remember when GPT-3 came out and everybody collectively freaked the hell out? That's how I've felt watching the reaction to any of the new model releases lately that make any progress.
I'm honestly not complaining about the model releases, though. Despite their shortcomings, they are extremely useful. I've found Gemini 3 to be an extremely useful learning aid, so as long as I don't blindly trust its output, and if you're trying to learn, you really ought not do that anyways. (Despite what people and benchmarks say, I've already caught some random hallucinations, it still feels like you're likely to run into hallucinations on a regular basis. Not a huge problem, but, you know.)
This is the new goalpost now that the "this model is so intelligent that it's sentient and dangerous" AGI hype has died down.
There are still a few things missing from all models: taste, shame and ambition. Yes they can write code, but they have no idea what needs does that code solve, what a good UX looks like and what not to ship. Not to mention that they all eventually go down rabbit holes of imaginary problems that cannot be solve (because they’re not real), and do where they will spend eternity unless w human says stop it right now.
They have a severe lack of wisdom, as well.
I've mainly been using Sonnet 4.5 so decided to give Opus 4.5 a whirl to see if could solve an annoying task I've been working on that Sonnet 4.5 absolutely fails on. Just started with "Are you familiar with <task> and can you help me?" and so far the response has been a resounding:
> Taking longer than usual. Trying again shortly (attempt 1 of 10)
> ...
> Taking longer than usual. Trying again shortly (attempt 10 of 10)
> Due to unexpected capacity constraints, Claude is unable to respond to your message. Please try again soon.
I guess I'll have to wait until later to feel the fear...
There are currently issues with the models. Claude Code doesn't work at all for me
Almost every single post on the ClaudeAI subreddit is like this. I use Opus 4.5 in my day to day work life and it has quickly become my main axe for agentic stuff but its output is not a world-shattering divergence from Anthropic's previous, also great iterations. The religious zealotry I see with these things is something else.
I suspect that recurring visitors of that subreddit may not be the greatest IT professionals, but a mixture of juniors (even those with 20 years of experience but still junior) and vibe coders.
Otherwise, with all due respect, there's very little of value to learn in that subreddit.
Why are we commenting the Claude subreddit?
1) it’s not impartial
2) it’s useless hype commentary
3) it’s literally astroturfing at this point
I tried it and I'm not impressed.
In threads where I see an example of what the author is impressed by, I'm usually not impressed. So when I see something like this, where the author doesn't give any examples, I also assume Claude did something unimpressive.
I used Claude Code to write a relatively complicated watchOS app. I know how to program (FAANG L5), but didn't really know Swift. I achieved a pretty good result for about $600, while a contractor would've cost much more.
so how long until our salaries match those of an llm ?
Good question. I left my job to start something on my own so an AI help is really nice. Should note that AI does make many boneheaded mistakes, and I have to solve some of the harder problems on my own.
Isn't Claude Max only $200 how come you paid $600 for that?
You can reach much higher spend through the API (which you can configure `$claude` to use)
It definitely feels like a jump in capability. I've found that the long term quality of the codebase doesn't take nosedive nearly as quickly as earlier agentic models. If anything it's about steady or maybe even increasing if you prompt it correctly and ask for "cleanup PRs"
Ironically AI may replace SWE way faster than it does for any other businesses in Stone Age.
Pick anything else you have a far better likelihood to fall back into manual process, legal wall, or whatever that AI cannot replace easily.
Good job boys and girls. You will be remembered.
I have to say, it was fun while it lasted! Couldn't really have asked for a more rewarding hobby and career.
Prompting an AI just doesn't have the same feeling, unfortunately.
For me it‘s the opposite. I do have a good feeling what I want to achieve, but translating this into and testing program code has always been causing me outright physical pain (and in case of C++ I really hate it). I‘ve been programming since age 10. Almost 40 years. And it feels like liberation.
It brings the “what to build“ question front and center while “how to build it“ has become much, much easier and more productive
Indeed. I still use AI for my side projects, but strictly limit to discussion only, no code. Otherwise what is the point? The good thing about programming is, unlike playing chess, there is no real "win/lose" in the scenario so I won't feel discouraged even if AI can do all the work by itself.
Same thing for science. I don't mind if AI could solve all those problems, as long as they can teach me. Those problems are already "solved" by the universe anyway.
Even the discussion side has been pretty meh in my mind. I was looking into a bug in a codebase filled with Claude output and for funsies decided to ask Claude about it. It basically generated a "This thing here could be a problem but there is manual validation for it" response, and when I looked, that manual validation were nowhere to be found.
There's so much half-working AI-generated code everywhere that I'd feel ashamed if I had to ever meet our customers.
I think the thing that gives me the most value is code review. So basically I first review my code myself, then have Claude review it and then submit for someone else to approve.
I don't discuss actual code with ChatGPT, just concepts. Like "if I have an issue and my algo looks like this, how can I debug it effectively in gdb?", or "how do I reduce lock contention if I have to satisfy A/B/...".
Maybe it's just because my side projects are fairly elementary.
And I agree that AI is pretty good at code review, especially if the code contains complex business logic.
Already happened for copywriters, translators, and others in the tech industry:
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/s/ai-killed-my-job
something in the back of my head tells me that automating (partial) intelligence feels different than automating a small to medium scope task, maybe i'm wrong though
I don’t think it’s ironic.
The commonality of people working on AI is that they ALL know software. They make a product that solves the thing that they know how to solve best.
If all lawyers knew how to write code, we’d seem more legal AI startups. But lawyers and coders are not a common overlap, surely nowhere as near as SWEs and coders.
For the most part, code monkeys haven't been a thing for quite some time now, I'm sure talented people will adapt and find other avenues to flourish
time to become a solar installer
Dario Amodei claimed "AI will replace 90% of developers within 6 months" about a year ago. Still they are just loosing money and will probably will be forever while just producing more slop code that needs even more devs to fix it.
Good job AI fanboys and girls. You will be remembered when this fake hype is over.
I'm more of a doomsayer than a fan boy. But I think it's more like "AI will replace 50% of your juniors and 25% of your seniors and perhaps 50% of your do-nothing middle managers", And that's a fairly large number anyway.
That’s only tangentially related but I have a very hard time using Opus for anything serious. Sonnet is still much more useful to me thanks to the context window size. By the moment Opus actually understands what’s needed, I’m n compactions deep and pretty much hoping for the best.
That’s a reason why I can’t believe the benchmarks and why I also believe open source models (claiming 200 but realistically struggling past 40k) aren’t only a bit but very far behind SOTA in actual software dev.
This is not true for all software, but there are types of systems or environments where it’s abundantly clear that Opus (or anything with a sub 1m window) won’t cut it, unless it has a very efficient agentic system to help.
I’m not talking about dumping an entire code base in the context, I’m talking about clear specs, some code, library guidelines, and a few elements to allow the LLM to be better than a glorified autocomplete that lives in an electron fork.
Sonnet still wins easily.
This just looks like an advertisement?
It's just a normal Reddit account which was dormant until two weeks ago when it suddenly started spamming threads exclusively about AIs imminent destruction of the job market. Nothing to see here!
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1pe6q11/deep_down...
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1pb57bm/im_honest...
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1pm7zm4/ai_cant_ev...
https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1plj...
https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1pft...
https://www.reddit.com/r/AI_Agents/comments/1pb6pjz/im_hones...
https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1phktji/ai...
https://www.reddit.com/r/csMajors/comments/1pk2f7b/ (cached title: Your CS degree is worthless. Switch over. Now.)
I wouldn’t be surprised if this is undisclosed PR from Anthropic
I've been using Claude Code + Opus for side projects. The only thing that's changed for me dev wise is that I QA more, and think more about how to solve my problems.
It's almost vindication for where I work an SDE needs to do everything, infra, development, deployment, launch, operations. There's no dedicated QA, test or operations on a product level, and while AI helped a great deal it's pretty clear it cannot replace me at least within the next 2 to 3 iterations.
If I was only writing code, the fear would be completely justified.
Same here. Using it this week and on Thursday I began to understand why Lee Sedol retired not long after being defeated by AlphaGo. For the stuff I'm good at, 3 months ago I was better than the models. Today, I'm not sure.
It's a Misanthropic propaganda forum. They even have Claude agree in the summary of the bot comments:
"The overwhelming consensus in this thread is that OP's fear is justified and Opus represents a terrifying leap in capability. The discussion isn't about if disruption is coming, but how severe it will be and who will survive."
My fellow Romans, I come here not to discuss disruption, but to survive!
I wonder if these coding models will be sustainable/profitable long term if the local models continue to improve.
qwen3-coder blew me away.
Not sure I’d be worried for my job, but it’s legitimately a significant jump in capabilities, even if other models attempt to fudge higher bench results
Reads like astroturf to me.
> do not know what's coming for us in the next 2-3 years, hell, even next year might be the final turning point already.
What is this based on? Research? Data? Gut feeling?
> but how long will it be until even that is not needed anymore?
You just answered that. 2 to 3 years, hell, even next year, maybe.
> it also saddens me knowing where all of this is heading.
If you know where this is heading why are you not investing everything you have in these companies? Isn't that the obvious conclusion instead of wringing your hands over the loss of a coding job?
It invents a problem, provides a time line, immediately questions itself, and then confidently prognosticates without any effort to explain the information used to arrive at this conclusion.
What am I supposed to take from this? Other than that people are generally irrational when contemplating the future?
We have reached the "singularity of marketing". It's what happens when an AI model has surpassed human marketers and traditional bot farms and can be used to do its own astroturfing. And then with the investment frenzy it generates, we can build the next generation of advertising intelligence and achieve infinite valuation!
Honeslty I have a lot of friends who are studying SWE and they are saying the same thing do you guys think that if they do get replaced they'll still be needed to maintin the AI's.
> Sure, I can watch Opus do my work all day long and make sure to intervene if it fucks up here and there, but how long will it be until even that is not needed anymore?
Right: if you expect your job as a software developer to be effectively the same shape on a year or two you're in for a bad time.
But humans can adapt! Your goal should be to evolve with the tools that are available. In a couple of years time you should be able to produce significantly more, better code, solving more ambitious profiles and making you more valuable as a software professional.
That's how careers have always progressed: I'm a better, faster developer today than I was two years ago.
I'll worry for my career when I meet a company that has a software roadmap that they can feasibly complete.
I just wanted to say I think it is doing people a great disservice to advocate for these specific kinds of tools, but the last paragraph is a universally correct statement, seemingly permanently.
How does Opus 4.5 compare to gpt-5.1-codex-max?
roughly, much better: https://www.swebench.com
flagged for astroturfing
OpenAI is burning through $60B a year in losses.
Something doesn't square about this picture: either this is the best thing since sliced bread and it should be wildly profitable, or ... it's not, and it's losing a lot of money because they know there isn't a market at a breakeven price.
They're losing money because they are in a training arms race. If other companies weren't training competitive models OpenAI would be making a ton of money by now.
They have several billion dollars of annual revenue already.
I think it's also a cultural thing... I mean it takes time for companies and professionals to get used to the idea that it makes sense to pay hundreds of dollars per month to use an AI. That that expense (that for some is relatively affordable and for other can be a serious one) actually converts in much higher productivity or quality.
Google is always going to be training a new model and are doing so while profitable.
If OpenAI is only going to be profitable (aka has an actual business model) if other companies aren't training a competitive model, then they are toast. Which is my point. They are toast.
Opus 4.5 is like a couple points higher then Sonnet 4.5 on the SWE benchmark.
"This model is so alive I want to donate a kidney to it!"