Thread

Getting the most out of Opus 5.5 in Claude and Claude Code

232 points · 156 comments · saikatsg

rdli · 1791060574 · focus · HN ↗
It’s a really good model. Over the past few days, I give Opus some general directives to basically speed up our CI, and telling it I care both about billing minutes and wall clock time. I told it to create a plan after analyzing everything in our CI, run the plan by a Fable subagent, and then focus on low-risk, high-reward changes.
9 hours later, I had 12 PRs ready to be merged, and the net result is CI time has dropped from ~10 minutes to ~4 minutes, and billing minutes have dropped around 60%. Less than an hour of my attention.
1. AnotherGoodName · 1791065400 · focus · HN ↗
  To back this up we have a discord chat for the board game terraforming mars where the agent takes input and vibe codes an open source implementation of the game.
  <a href="https://tfmbot.com" rel="nofollow">https://tfmbot.com is the link (discord and source links on the splash screen).
  The results are fucking incredible to the point where people in discord are stating "I'm surprised this is working so well". I am too.
  I feel like there's a group online that missed the boat. Anything negative towards AI capabilities is still upvoted but I've been in the industry for over 25years, highly respected and can't fathom the "AI dumb lololol" type of comments i see on HN. AI is superseeding all other ways to develop.
  1. TeMPOraL · 1791066964 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm restoring a game I played as a kid, that I couldn't reliably get to even start on modern Windows. The skill and speed with which Opus 5.5 got it running, while patching a bunch of bugs in the binary along the way (only some of them I knew about), has my jaw still on the floor - and few hours in, I already have whole campaign mapped out as state machine graph, and we're upscaling graphics now.
  2. sashank_1509 · 1791067981 · focus · HN ↗
    Pretty sure no one on HN says AI dumb
    AnotherGoodName · 1791068545 · focus · HN ↗
    From just this morning i read this thread: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49946321">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49946321 about a linux distro no longer allowing AI code and the comments are mostly along the lines of "This will be great for maintainability, AI can't code any complexity" which is essentially what I'm getting at here.
    AI writes clean code and can do so in a very maintainable way honestly.
    tripleee · 1791071723 · focus · HN ↗
    One of the last things developers had to offer was being able to guide the AI to write maintainable code. Now that it can do that there's not a whole lot left
    It's understandable why that's hard to accept
  3. CoolestBeans · 1791071634 · focus · HN ↗
    I just see the extremes. You either see people unable to recreate results and them calling people idiots for claiming those results. Or you see people saying that AI will supersede all other ways to develop and calling anyone who doesn't full embrace AI an idiot. Reality is that nobody knows nothing. There are a million factors that could cause the end result to be anywhere between both extremes. I don't know, you don't know, AI doesn't know, least of all the people inside the AI companies don't know. And really the end result will be extremely nuanced I'm sure.
  4. tripleee · 1791072435 · focus · HN ↗
    One of the last things developers had to offer was being able to guide the AI to write maintainable code. Now that it can do that there's not a whole lot left It's understandable why that's hard to accept

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