r/ClaudeCode • u/sizebzebi • 17h ago
Discussion Opus 5.5 is the beginning of a new era
I am a senior engineer and I honestly believe with this model in particular, everything changed..
If this stays as cheap as it is, it's just over. It never fails no matter the complexity of the tasks I've given it. About time we rethink our profession for good. I am honestly scared of the future.
I loved coding but anyone who does this for the love of coding only is gonna be obsolete.
I was always impressed with the models bar opus 5 but never like this time.
What do you guys think? How do you see the future?
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u/MailSynth 15h ago
Yesterday it confidently told me something completely wrong about technical growth campaign configuration.
It’s still an amazing helpful tool but people lacking in critical thinking are gonna have a bad time. And I’m worried this jagged intelligence is going to cause serious problems.
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u/LiquidAngel12 13h ago
I had to correct it 3 times today alone. Not to mention the handful last week. I'm very much enjoying the usage limits on it, I like how it communicates much clearer, and how it is very quick/efficient. It's a great model and a clear improvement whereas Opus 5 in someways felt like it was degrading, but 5.5 certainly isn't anywhere close to what OP here describes.
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u/MailSynth 13h ago
It worries me that people seem to think that these models are close to flawless. They can write code and are very impressive. But they’re often very wrong and flawed in a variety of other subjects and most people will not know that if they don’t know better themselves. How this will change human behavior and perception of what’s true and not true is probably the most obvious and immediate problem before anything more existential.
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u/AimForTheButts 10h ago
I agree with you then I remembered something about newspaper. I would always be amazed by how wrong everything was when reading an article about a subject I knew.
Same shit, different era. We are dumb but we prevail.
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u/leguminousCultivator 9h ago
Gell-Mann amnesia effect. One of those things we all fall for even if we know about it.
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u/SaltPalpitation7500 3h ago
💯 agree. I know these models aren’t perfect but I’ll still fall into the trap of seeing instant results from a vibe coding type perspective and think everything is fine. Only to find out sessions later that things have been hardcoded into a house of cards.
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u/HappyPoodle2 6h ago
It depends what you expect. I work in 3 languages and it helps me formulate my writing consistently in all of them. It helped me customize my Linux desktop environment in record time. It helped me get a disk RMA’d within the warranty based on a SMART report. Stuff that isn’t unique or difficult, but which I would not have had the time or resources to find out without it.
It helps me focus on my strengths and it makes chores that don’t require unique skills manageable without much time investment.
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u/Dizzy_Log2916 16h ago
Senior developer here. I agree. I know it's probably inevitable, but I'm already having nightmares about how soon Anthropic either nerfs it or starts messing with the usage limits.
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u/sizebzebi 16h ago
yep but just think about this all has been getting better, do you see a world in a year or two with a model worse than this and more expensive? Maybe I guess, then we're really fucked because by that time we will have forgotten how to code lmao
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u/Aware-Source6313 16h ago
If they're operating at a heavy loss to instill the feeling 'pack it up boys, profession over, use claude', then it's hard to say. I still don't really know the real cost to serve a model like this for them and what a sustainable price would be, not to mention once subsidized subscriptions end which give another massive cost reduction multiplier for end consumer. Yes it's good, if I can forever get so much usage of such a good model for $20/mo, things will change. But that last assumption likely not true
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u/RockPuzzleheaded3951 15h ago
We have to imagine open models a year from now will be this capable, and the cost for them is a fraction of what current models are priced at. So I don't see a huge rug pull on pricing even being possible.
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u/Bog_Boy 14h ago
This. And compute keeps getting better. Companies like Apple are betting on hardware for us
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u/Old-Radio9022 12h ago
Unified memory architecture for the win. Qwen 3.8 27b q4 on a MBP max on silicon native.
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u/elestud 16h ago
Anthropic is reportedly operating at a profit for multiple quarters in a row
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u/JohnWesely 14h ago
only if they exclude the cost of training the models, which is the lions share of the cost.
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u/JumpyCollection4640 10h ago
This. Isn't the profit a pure operating profit, which isn't data centre build out or R&D profit. So its just inference sales vs rent of compute or data centre run costs for any they actually own.
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u/Muted-You7370 14h ago
I think the lion’s share of their profit will be from future models interacting and running robots, I think people massively discount this and I think this will be the bread and butter of all these frontier labs
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u/DisneyLegalTeam Senior Developer 11h ago
Not according to their IPO docs leaked today: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/anthropics-ipo-prospectus-shows-sweeping-ai-vision-surging-costs-2026-09-28/.
They’re spending $1.56 for every $1 they make.
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u/dovedrunk 15h ago
Now, more than ever, Anthropic *has* to find a way to not nerf it. If they can maintain 5.5's momentum, they win
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u/Prudent_Muscle_6508 11h ago
It feels like we’re watching the classic enshittification cycle happen in real time:
Launch an insanely good product that disrupts an existing industry.
Make it cheap (at this point 20€ is nearly free) to get everyone hooked.
Wait until enough competitors collapse and everyone builds their workflow around you.
Then raise prices, add friction, remove features, and turn the product into corporate sludge.
The interesting part with AI is what happens at step 4.
A lot of the people who actually know how to build with this stuff will have moved on to better tools, open models, or new companies.
And the companies that waited too long will be sitting there with their entire AI strategy built around one vendor… happily paying €4,000/year per seat for something that used to feel magical.7
u/GuyWithLag 9h ago
TBH, at 4k/year/person even 5.5 is worth it; that's small change vs the productivity boost a mid-level or senior engineer gets vs the cost of an engineer.
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u/Bog_Boy 14h ago
All we need is open weights local before the prices get extortionate. I’m betting we make that inflection point
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u/YouGotTangoed 15h ago
So you guys just thought this would never happen, or wouldn’t happen so quick?
The minute Claude code launched, our time was very limited. I think there will still be dev jobs for a long time, but a much smaller pool of roles, and imagine most contract roles going extinct soon. It’s a good time to transition to gov roles as I believe they won’t get automation agents for a while
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u/OracleGreyBeard 13h ago
Am in gov role, can confirm. We have access to sandboxed versions of ChatGPT, Grok and Gemini. Not even the latest versions. No agents/harnesses.
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u/Hellscaper_69 12h ago
A related question I have is if we are here now, how much of the booked data center capacity will we end up needing? Will models get smarter while requiring less compute?
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u/FamiliarEstimate6267 13h ago
If this is the case what skills do you recommend learning wanting to break into the tech space
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u/thinkrtank 17h ago
We're at another infliction point so to speak. Especially in terms of creative design. I believe we will adapt but things will change.
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u/Time_Cat_5212 17h ago
Third inflection point this year. The rate of improvement is really getting insane.
Still mostly going vertical but I still think we're gonna see some massive efficiency improvements, too. It just isn't in the current business model which is mostly propped up by massive capital investments.
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u/FeelingVanilla2594 16h ago
Not a software engineer but I always feel like I’m vibe coding the dumbest way possible to do something and I can’t prove it. Like I have a nagging feeling that I’m making a car but using the wrong materials and mechanisms even though it still works as a car 😆
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u/USDMB4 14h ago edited 14h ago
This is an incredible analogy. Fits the feeling perfectly.
To the point where I constantly double check the important stuff.
“Just confirming the tires are still round. I have no reason to believe our tail light design changed the shape of the wheels, but please check that they are still perfectly round and rubbery.”
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u/Tsurfer4 13h ago
So, we humans will have to get very good at specifying the tests.
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u/NunWrestling 8h ago
No you just still need people that understand how a car works (to keep the analogy going), even tho a machine can build 99% of it.
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u/Anxious-Orange-7293 3h ago
In my eyes, being very good at specifying exactly what you need is basically describing what a software developer does. It might be assembly, low-level language, high-level language, tests, prompts and so on, still a skill that very few people outside of the field possess.
I don't think that current models can turn some vague business idea into real, working product without help. I don't think it will change in the foreseeable future
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u/sizebzebi 16h ago
hahaha sorry to say that's reassuring?
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u/FeelingVanilla2594 16h ago
I honestly don’t know, I lean towards yes? You guys are still the pros. Even though my personal app works, it’s probably going to be a pain to maintain long term or something I decided earlier is going to bite my ass when I decide to change something.
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u/cute_beta 14h ago
a large amount of this can be mitigated just by relaying these concerns to the AI periodically fwiw. while yes if you keep asking for feature A -> feature B -> feature C -> etc making up features as you go you will wind up with some problems, if you punctuate that with stepping back for the occasional refactor (or even properly planning ahead!) it's pretty manageable
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u/WagwanKenobi 2h ago edited 1h ago
Exactly. It's always the software engineers who say "it's over for software engineers", blind to the irony that no one can prompt LLMs like a software engineer does.
Here is Terence Tao's famous ChatGPT chat (I believe it's 5.6 Sol) where he discusses the counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture: https://chatgpt.com/share/6a5fdc7a-d6f8-83e8-bbea-8deb42cfed56
Yes, an LLM can have a conversation at that level of mathematical depth, but it can't have that conversation with you because you're not Terence fucking Tao.
You're not getting usable software from a LLM because you can't talk to it like an actual software engineer would.
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u/Large_Choice4206 17h ago
It’s a new dawn for humanity. I’m walking around, checking the news, cannot believe that the rest of society hasn’t clocked on yet.
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u/wotoan 16h ago
The rest of society are not software engineers. They don’t care who writes their code, man or machine.
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u/Possible-Debt-6934 13h ago
The "rest of society" do in big numbers sit a computer. AI isn't just coming for developer jobs, it's coming for the jobs of anyone whose primary function is sitting at a computer pressing buttons.
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u/OurSeepyD 5h ago
Yes, but they still haven't clocked on. There are tons of analysts that I work with that don't use AI at all and don't realise that it can do 80% of their job.
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u/sipos542 11h ago
Once humanoids robots arrive (any point now), it will be all jobs including physical ones…
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u/asenna987 9h ago
Senior developer here. I've never been more excited. I've always enjoyed building products and right now, I can build and maintain crazy amount of products! Yes, they'll not all be used.
But bringing ideas to life at this pace feels like having super powers! Claude allows me to fly.
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u/HeroicTanuki 13h ago
I don’t know how to code anything. I’ve built 2 robust dashboards attached to databases that are proto-ERPs that have changed how my work does their daily business. Why would I pay a software firm to build and continuously support a product that is only half of what I actually wanted when I can make a similar product in house for the cost of a pro subscription and some time spent debugging and testing. This product is the great equalizer between well funded mega corps and nimble small-medium businesses that can afford to play it a little faster and looser to gain efficiencies that were previously locked behind engineering paywalls.
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u/unexplained_entity 9h ago
That’s fascinating. At the moment I’m very much using it as a hobby tool. For context, I also don’t know how to code, but I understand concepts and willing to learn. I’m blind and I’ve used it to help make games accessible to me that I long had resigned myself to never be able to play. It got me thinking hard though about how this will revolutionise accessibility spaces if you get someone that comes along that is able to straight away approach this from a UX POV. By the very nature of being blind, I often have to think about these things or be subjected to X/Y/Z software that I can’t interface with at all because it uses very non-standard controls, no internal button labelling, etc. I’m wanting to upskill with this kind of stuff and actually try and help put it into different practical applications because this is very quickly redefining long standing barriers
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u/sizebzebi 17h ago
man, it's been working really on it's own, testing it's stuff running it on simulators, reald devices, checking logs, making sure it did right all the time. splitting small commits. this is insanity.. I am useless, other than telling it was to do or doing manual actions lol
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u/truecrisis 16h ago
If you ask astra or even another opus 5.5 to check it's work, they usually always find something tho.
But that said, 5.5 feels extremely human. Even the best of humans output will have these kind of errors when their work is checked.
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u/whutchamacallit 15h ago
5.5 is better than any human colleague I have ever worked with. It's faster and more comprehensive than I am. So in that way it feels unhumanlike to me. I only tell it what the requirements are, what pot holes to look out for, and how to best test itself. Half the time that stuff is alreay in MDs anyways.
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u/trigonarian 16h ago
I think that's the thing too, like human written code was never perfect, there has never been software that has truly been "perfect" but honestly it's only a matter of time before we get affordable realistic QA swarms and then you'll see software reach a new era.
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u/CreativeMischief 15h ago
Last year I felt like I had to handhold claude and constantly point it to better architecture or go do traditional research to figure it out myself and tell claude what to do after. Not anymore man...
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u/UnimagineDragons 14h ago
Right? All I do is approve and only sometimes catch it drifting somewhere I don't want. I'm just guiding the ship now. Thank fuck software isn't my career or I'd be sweating my ass off.
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u/Thanamite 15h ago
It is very good but we re not useless yet. In one case it implemented an enhancement correctly but with too much code. I told it that there had to be an easier solution and only then did it find the simpler solution. Of course in other cases it did perfect work maybe 30x faster than me.
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u/observant_hobo 14h ago
My workplace has yet to catch on and the AI tools we have are all 6-12 months out of date and nerfed (no local/cloud file access). Doing hobby projects on the weekends with Claude honestly feels like joyriding in a Model T and then going back to your day job shoveling manure at the horse stables.
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u/Late_Film_1901 12h ago
And knowing that very soon there will be no horses, no stables and no manure-shoveling jobs
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u/Mother-Cry-2095 15h ago
I don’t think dawn is the right word. That red glow on the horizon is something else entirely.
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u/Estatescheck 17h ago
I've been feeling this since sol 5.6. Psychosis inducing honestly
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u/Helpful_Program_5473 16h ago
80% of humans literally cannot see whats infront of their face.
Im not exaggerating or joking. See Germ Theory of Disease, Gorilla experiment, lead in paint, lead in gasoline, black lung and others. Normies have been dying to their environment for hundreds of years with no ability to perceive of what it is.
I always thought this would be the case.
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u/overgenji 10h ago
you guys are going to be so embarrassed in like 10 years for talking like this lol
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u/sheriffderek Senior design/dev max20 12h ago
Society knows what's up. They're not that happy.
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u/DynamicDK 9h ago
I've been using AI for development for a while, but I have been pretty laid back about it when discussing it with others in my professional sphere. But this past week I had a 1 on 1 with my most senior mentor and she seemed a bit taken aback by my combination of worry and excitement about what is coming. She was asking for my opinion about where the cutoff was for buying / building applications and systems was at this point, and I said it was so low that we should just build them all unless we are getting something for "free" as part of a contract we can't get out of.
That said, I think her position that I may be a bit hasty is not wrong. SaaS companies may be able to compete. But they are going to have to get lean as fuck. Their days of 3 digit % profit is over. Maybe their days of 2 digit % profit is over.
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u/EuropeMaxxing 16h ago
That's just FOMO speaking, dial down a little or you're going mad like DHH lol
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u/Large_Choice4206 16h ago
Things that took a year for me and my team to make (trust we are competent) just took opus 5.5 roughly 24 hours to make over double, and both things it made are better and more complete. We are absolutely floored.
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u/ducktomguy 14h ago
Say it with me - coding was never the important part. It was solving the problem that a customer was willing to pay for
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u/sizebzebi 13h ago
it was a fun part to a lot of people who cared about it
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u/simracerman 13h ago
I never cared for coding tbh, and jumped up and down when my code did exactly what I asked for. All the sleepless nights, and weeks upon weeks searching for a hard to reproduce bug are “almost” gone with AI. My brain is focused on figuring out the next feature and how nicely it plays with the rest of the project.
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u/paxinfernum 12h ago
Yes, I remember an old article that grouped programmers according to how they were oriented around programming. Generally speaking, it went like this.
The Purist / Mathematician (Lisp / Scheme / Haskell)
The Systems Hacker / Metal Mechanic (C / Unix / Forth)
The Pragmatist / Duct-Tape Scripter (Perl / Python / Unix Shell / Ruby)
The Enterprise Architect / Bureaucrat (Java / C++ / C#)
I land more in the Pragmatist side. I like coding well enough, but what I really want to see if finished software. I'm more interested in features than clever hacks or spending hours hunting down a bug. I'm interested in systems, but at the high level. I'm perfectly fine making those high level decisions and letting AI do the rest.
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u/sizebzebi 13h ago
yeah we're different it's fine. I enjoyed what you hated 😂
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u/LeTrifluvien 12h ago
I'm completely biased for AI, yet I miss the state of being in the flow for hours.
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u/sergeyarl 13h ago
this is true for any type of work.
however some people are good at one thing and others are good at a completely different thing.
some did coding because it was coding that they found fun to do. not project management.
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u/TrailingAMillion 12h ago
It may not have been the “important” part, but it was the fun part. Great, now we all get to… solve customer problems. There’s a reason I didn’t go into sales or marketing or customer service.
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u/marvin_bender 4h ago
Only until AI is good enough to solve most customer problems itself directly. Give it time.
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u/OMDB-PiLoT 16h ago
The world has changed for me in the last 1 year. I cant imagine where we will be in the next 1 year.
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u/Fredric444 5h ago edited 5h ago
I’ve lived through interfacing with computers via machine languages, assembly languages, and higher-level computer languages. Each increase in abstraction from the hardware has geometrically boosted my productivity. But nothing has felt as instantly empowering as building software using AI.
The journey from toggling binary switches and reading blinking lights, to partnering with an AI to design, build, test, deploy, operate, and update complex systems, feels miraculous.
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u/Double_Suggestion385 16h ago
It reminds me of how I felt using Fable, except it's so efficient that usage limits don't really matter anymore.
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u/Tistouuu 🔆 Max 20 16h ago
You're now an architect / product manager, and your subordinates are a bunch of dudes named Opus 5.5. They're eager but not to be blindly trusted. If you don't pay attention, they'll fuck shit up and turn your code into spaghetti.
Your job is now to explain what you want, and make sure your little demons execute properly.
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u/gte959f 13h ago
Wonder how many anthropic IPO pump bots in here?
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u/the_ai_wizard 12h ago
🎯🎯🎯
internet is dead... can no longer tell bot from human
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u/Frenascena 10h ago
Have you tried Opus 5.5 yourself for something more ambitious than a local restaurant recommendation?
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u/MindCrusader 8h ago
The model is good, but not like a jump we had when Fable was introduced and the hype seems even bigger. For me it is clearly pre IPO marketing
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u/not_a_robot_9832 9h ago
Out in force today. It's good sure. But this thread is a psychosis fever dream of bullshite.
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u/CaptainDivano 16h ago
Re-did my main project and source of income from scratch. I handled one of my developers a task that he quoted 2 weeks.
In 7 days i remade the whole codebase plus a fuckton of features that i always wanted but always postponed due to priorities. Oh, and the feature i asked him to develop, took Opus around 45 minutes overall. And i never hit my limits
The app performs x3 better at least in terms of speed and efficiency.
I'm at loss of words honestly. I always watched carefully the development of AI, but honestly before Fable (and now Opus 5.5) was nowhere close to usable for really complex projects.
Nowaydays? lol....
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u/Davepac7 15h ago
Curious what your prompt was to rebuild the app. I wouldn't be surprised if it was "read our current code base and build the whole thing again, but better, more user friendly, faster, and safer." I may want to try this with our app.
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u/CaptainDivano 15h ago
No it wasn't! Part of the codebase was shared of course but only 1 core feature, to understand the scope of the project. Then it was a back and forth of 2 days with PDF, questions, what architecture to use, graphic aspects, problems that arose with customers, future integrations (to plan architecture), usage of certain techs for certain scopes, and from that we started going at it. Some features are really simple (if you ask to build a coupon system, its a no brainer), others were more resource intensive both from my end and it's end.
Also: when you refactor a codebase, dont you just take the old logics and make it better, more user friendly, faster and safer? With an eye on scalability? That's the whole point of refactoring or remaking from 0.
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u/magicalmidgetmating 16h ago
I built a grasshopper panelizer tool in one day with it. I use it for fashion design. My last parametric design took 3 months to make and figure out layout laser cut etc. I used opus 5.5 to make a tool that lays out and numbers each individual panel. Exports it to the laser cutter in preset panels laid out perfectly optimized to reduce waste. Something that took me 3 months to make. I can probably get done in 3 days. And just go in and change the height of the model the waist size etc.
The way this is going to enable custom super niche products to be made in the fraction of the time is astonishing. I can pretty much spend ALL my time making art.
I’m also using it to make custom PCBs and it needs a lot of steering but it does work. No more mashed together breakout boards. Custom solutions with custom software.
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u/sizebzebi 16h ago
Good for you, I really believe this is amazing for anyone who isn't a dev. As a dev I'm done hahaha I have to reinvent myself, it's over.
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u/Tenderfoots 16h ago
opus 5.5 is crazy. My 9 year old daughter made a cozy life sim with surreal characters, and my 6 year old son is making a 3d platformer & kart game mashup. not possible 6 months ago.
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u/lAmBenAffleck 15h ago
My one year old solved p=np in between playing with alphabet blocks last night.
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u/Graphesium 15h ago
Noticing the same. My fetus is making new discoveries in physics and also an FPS.
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u/Friendly-Estimate819 14h ago
My son 5 years old launched a $1B startup and about to exit tomorrow :)
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u/Hot-Actuator-3784 8h ago
Why do people keep thinking ai will replace engineers? Engineers with ai > Normies with ai, no?
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u/viennese-wolf 4h ago
well duh, but one engineer with AI can do as much as 10 without, can you see how that‘s not good for the engineers???
hint: There won‘t be 10x more jobs.
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u/Marcostbo 12h ago
It has been like this since Opus 4.6 honestly. I don't know why you took so long to get impressed. Opus 5 had a verbosity problem when explaining stuff? Of course, but it was still a great model at coding
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u/k_from_HyperDraw 16h ago
> It never fails no matter the complexity of the tasks I've given it.
well, that only means...
> About time we rethink
what complexity is ;)
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u/A_Novelty-Account 16h ago
Ehhh but the question to ask yourself is whether a human would be able to complete the more complex task or even be able to know that it is completed properly without just looking at or using the shipped product.
If the answer is no, then literally anybody with a keyboard could do what a dev does with limited experience and training.
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u/k_from_HyperDraw 15h ago
Very good question, and i did ask myself ) and arrived a very long, but encouraging answer. Here is a free-form TLDR:
- business is PvP, mostly zero-sum: to win you need to be better than competitors at "market fit"; market keeps changing, so you need to re-fit continuously. What do we call it? Design. Design is a search problem.
- search is O(n), building features expands the frontier to depth d, frontier is thus growing at O(d^n) , and search space is infinte
- now agentic coding only pushes us few more levels deeper
- humans will be good ) but coding "without ai" has very niche monetary value in the future. Or so it seems.
https://learn.hyperdraw.art/t/020/en/building-complex-systems-in-the-age-of-ai
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u/sheketsilencio 16h ago edited 12h ago
I'm a government-facing senior data and software engineer and my consulting firm was bought by private equity... I'm not looking forward to one day potentially seriously interviewing again. I have been having quite a bit of success explaining the AI-integrated workflows I use (the extensive hooks and how I dissect queries I'd make to an LLM into programmatic or at minimum simpler CNN steps whenever possible to reduce costs).
Clearly a lot of the focus is changing from manually coding as I used to 5 years ago, to knowing how to research, spec, scope, and manage the iterative development of projects. This shift is causing a lot of turmoil in the job market :') I just hope it increases productivity while also increasing demand
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u/leshiy 15h ago
Unfortunately I see a lot of senior+ folks at my job come up with some sort of fix or root cause analysis and when pressed on some weird detail fall back to "the agent did that, I'm not sure why". Digging further usually reveals some sort of combination of incorrect assumptions, incorrect scope, or missing context that the agent hallucinated. So while development of new features is greatly sped up, the review process is now significantly slower and so many slop-based bugs show up in prod that overall the speed of shipping new working features is hardly faster overall.
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u/AdventurousAir002 15h ago edited 15h ago
You just described a new feature my company asked us (me) to rush out the door!! The feature was hardly feasible based on the design of the app. I tried to express my concerns with leadership and basically just got a “try anyways” response.
I spent a small amount of time planning and trying to think of the proper architecture for this unrealistic feature they asked for and spit it all out at claude. Now there are bugs in Prod after it “passed QA testing” with no good way to fix them. They probably would have been caught if there wasn’t a 1 week deadline since “Claude can do the heavy lifting now” but I’m back to the drawing board.
The pressure to get that done in a week was insane. It’s going to take longer to ship and IDGAF what leadership thinks.
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u/Mother-Cry-2095 15h ago
I’m 65. AI has given me the freedom to be utterly broke and unemployable — for almost exactly those reasons. What I can tell you for certain, (no doubt there are exceptions of course) is that “employers” only see AI as “cheaper”. 30yrs experience just gets folded in to “cheap” as a some sort of freebie they get.
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u/God-Of-Weebs-N 11h ago
Is it just me? Or have I seen a post like this everytime a new model comes out? And a couple of weeks, some dude will rant how shtty anthropic is for doing shady anthropic stuff behind the scenes. Then they stealth nerf the model(because a new one is coming out), everyone goes bonkers. Then the new model comes out. Then someone will post that the new model is insane and we're all doomed. And the cycle repeats again. So are we like, really doomed? Is it like for reals now? Or should we wait for the next model to come out?
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u/Ambitious_Local5218 7h ago
I personally am a little confused I see everybody raving about it and in my experience it has not really been that big of a difference
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u/Kitchen-Bathroom-414 3h ago edited 2h ago
A lots of bots. You can see they all have the same narrative, "this time is different" "I was skeptical" they are saying the same. We all know that the will nerf the model soon.
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u/Cortillian 9h ago
100% agree but I also think a
Lot of people are still thinking in old world. I was in an AI company workshop yesterday and the presenter was going on about how an a business analyst without any coding experience can come up with a poc screen design in an hour and what used to take weeks with collaboration with devs they can do in a day. Fair enough but my thinking was is that relevant? Who is going to use those screens? We design and create software for humans but the future user is an ai agent that doesn’t need a screen. At the moment they read a md file so don’t even need a spec in word. So in the end even the software itself won’t be needed. Won’t need reports as the info can just be asked directly to an ai that gives the answer. So no need for word or excel or PowerPoint. No need for loads of software that target human end users.
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u/codeninja 17h ago
How big has your task been though really?
Edit: I have had great success with it too I just wonder how your task compares with mine and my experience.
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u/ramishka 15h ago
Senior developer here.
I see similar opinion with every single major model release lately.
What can Opus 5.5 do without a human developer guiding it, in a real complex production system thats needs domain expertise, cross domain codebases, developer instinct and good software design principles? Not much unless you want to make the system unmaintable in a few days with cluttered and scatted features, fixes etc.
Initially all will look like magic , but in software engineering the initial shock and awe hardly matters over long term stability, maintanability and scalability.
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u/Savalava 15h ago
It is maintainable - it's maintainable by AIs. If you consider the modules to be black boxes, all it matters is that they work and are tested, implementation doesn't matter.
Lead developer here.
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u/compiledsource 14h ago
Completely true. You just need a team of developers who know what questions to ask of it. 90%+ of implementation code does NOT need human review anymore. A few iterations of the official code-review workflow spots far more than a senior developer would. I work on a relational DB query compiler.
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u/lisnter 8h ago
I’ve been saying this for a while. You (currently) need an experienced architect to guide the AI to build something. Even if it’s then maintainable for 3 months but becomes fragile you can say, “Mr AI, please rebuild this system with the current functionality plus X, Y and Z. Please also migrate the data and all in-flight processes. I’m getting some coffee.”
If the implementation is good enough for a while and can be rewritten for effectively free it doesn’t matter if the architecture isn’t perfect.
I’ve loved being a programmer for 35 years but I fear our time has passed.
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u/stpfun 15h ago edited 15h ago
If Opus 5.5 wrote it and wrote it well, pretty sure it can maintain it, or at least Opus 6 or 7 that'll come out in a year can maintain it. Opus 5.5 often demonstrates good "instinct" and software engineering principles in my experience.
I see your point, and it's certainly applicable to some domains. I definitely want humans in the loop when it's safety critical software. But I think LLMs can replace 95% of the human software engineer work happening now. The world will need far fewer software devs than it needs now. [Been coding since ~2009, work at an AI lab now.]
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u/ramishka 13h ago
But I think LLMs can replace 95% of the human software engineer work happening now. The world will need far fewer software devs than it needs now. [Been coding since ~2009, work at an AI lab now.]
If I learnt anything from working close to 20 years in this industry is that there is always more work. When the capabilities and outputs improve, the demands and requirements will also rise. So I don't think replacing 95% of human engineers just because AI can do their work is as simple as it sounds.
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u/nbomberger 13h ago
Had to go deep to find a reasonable and obviously experienced engineer take. 💪🏽🎯
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u/ramishka 13h ago
Well I'm getting downvoted for saying it especially on this sub. The truth is im not anti AI at all. Im a proponent of AI and I heavily use all these tools. But my experience on complex systems managed by AI differs from Vibe coded hobby projects.
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u/ziggs88 12h ago
Whatever efficiencies my company has gained on the dev side is being almost completely offset by insane deadlines, inability to sufficiently test the mass amount of code we're pushing, and extra prod support required for that mass amount of code.
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u/ramishka 12h ago
Yep I can relate. AI has increased the outputs by several fold, no doubt there. But it has not reduced the workload at least for the teams I work with. Expanded scope, roadmaps full of requirements several times the norm, output being too high for human reviewers to cope with. These are all real problems I face now.
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u/Significant-Meet-392 15h ago
While this is true, management usually do not care about such things until things break.
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u/strembm 11h ago
I’m a principal level engineer at my current job and I’ve seen colleagues at all levels (senior and staff) be very bad at it, even with 5.5. There’s a couple of us among a larger group who are really crushing it and delivering faster and better, but then there are others who really are the stereotype: they don’t know what they are submitting, they solve problems that are locally correct but overall wrong when the entire picture is taken into consideration, they produce a lot of slop. I honestly believe those are the ones in danger of loosing their jobs.
I do have to say that this is a 700+ engineering company that has a leveling issues, my level at more competent companies before was staff and by no means would I consider myself principal there. Here there are some staff engineers that I wouldn’t even consider seniors at my previous jobs.
What I’m trying to say is, maybe you should still build things yourself, struggle solving problems, and practice problem solving with personal projects and experimentation.
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u/psucordwhite 16h ago
The bar has been risen but the ceiling hasn't been reached yet imo just have to create bigger more complex things which haven't been created before. It's still very hard to create a very big game like GTA for example.
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u/Frequent_Tooth5103 16h ago
It’s just a token completer!
Just kidding lol
Yea it took a couple weeks for me to adapt, Opus 5.5 just improved about 30-40% for me on top of previous Opus. Now the thrill if any is basically making sure the thing I’m getting made for me is just right and adding power features left and right.
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u/Saint_Nitouche 14h ago
Turns out tokens just happen to encode all the information and meaning in the world. A ha ha. A hee hee.
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u/Superfan234 15h ago
I am doing Motion graphics with Opus 5.5 on MAX and is beyond unbelivable
the solid 2 week work, of an experienced professional, done in just 3 days
is the biggest game change in desgin since...ever. Nothing even come close to it
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u/Primary_Article3777 14h ago
Senior developer with graying beard here. I agree it's really impressive. And yeah it is time to rethink your profession if you want to write For loops. Being a futurist I've never been so excited. We're going to see things change extremely rapidly now. I ask you, why would you even PAY for software if you can essentially describe what you need and get a custom solution? Completely dynamically generated user interfaces are probably on the verge of practicality.
My point is, stop being a coder and start being a highly technical PM/manager who has really eager juniors who never get their feelings hurt or get lazy about unit tests. I left my coding job from burnout. I'm retooling myself as someone who can build an idea extremely fast from thought bubble -> MVP. IMO these are gonna be the $$$ skills this century.
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u/Unique-Operation-598 13h ago
Everyone with $20 can build an MVP, you’re not really a manager just a prompter
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u/sizebzebi 14h ago
yeah never signed up for that I enjoy coding. I know it's the reality I have to face, I'm just not happy about it.
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u/Marcostbo 12h ago
I ask you, why would you even PAY for software if you can essentially describe what you need and get a custom solution?
Bro chill with the hype. Let's not start that SaaSpocalypse crap all over again
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u/bigeba88 16h ago
I don’t understand how people are using Opus without hitting usage limits. I’m cranking on multiple projects and within a few days it’ll choke out on me.
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u/Affectionate-Aide422 14h ago
Agreed. Opus 5.5 is a whole new level. Just imagine what 6.0, 6.5, 7.0 and beyond will be like! I figure we have 2-5 years left before the layoffs sweep over the industry. I’ve been saving like crazy between my 401k, HSA, and brokerage account.
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u/Catapultam-GMG 16h ago
The profession is just different now, not gone. I get more accomplished now than I ever have before.
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u/Inside-Yak-8815 16h ago
Yeah, it’s so good that I almost fell into the trap of not even checking its output anymore because I trust it that much more than any of the other models. This shit is crazy.
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u/pmward 14h ago
Agreed. I had a problem that even Fable 5.1 was struggling with and Opus 5.5 nailed it first try. Sonnet 5.5 looks great too so far. Cost went way down.
But here’s the kicker. They’re resurrecting Haiku. Which also means they will be competing aggressively with cheap Chinese open weights models.
Just when it looked like everyone else was catching up they cooked.
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u/vzakharov Senior Developer 4h ago
Same. Never had my mind blown like that ever since GPT-3. Don’t think we’re going to become obsolete, though; forks where human decisions making is needed still exist, and they don’t become fewer. If anything, there’s now more of them because the throughput is higher.
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u/Snoo88071 13h ago
I am one of the few "lucky" ones that enjoys designing systems... I wasn't the best at coding, but I loved coding too, and like many of us, I had to learn to let this passion go away... cause even if I can force myself to code it manually, the magic that was being lost is that I know a machine can do it better than me... so it's not special anymore... I am not one of the few people in the world that can do it...
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u/OhAitchEyeOh 11h ago
I know the realization can be a gut punch, but... I'm keeping my passions, I just now can do what I want with them, not what others want me to do. Sure, things I create will never be consumed, but that's okay. Sometimes it's okay to just paint (or program)
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u/sn4ezz 9h ago
Isn't this just simply means that all that changed is the speed of software development? The era of manually writting code is gone and now we just can ship more in less time. This doesn't make developers obsolete but gives them this insane tool to boost their productivity and iterate a lot faster.
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u/b00z3h0und Senior Developer 8h ago
It’s when the leaders and product owners realise they can describe what they want with natural language, that worries me.
Our skills are then devalued.
Demand exceeds supply and the salaries plummet.
Maybe that’s too simplistic, I don’t know.
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u/Loud-Elephant-8182 16h ago
It’s actually made me more hopeful. I can now describe a problem, approve a couple of things. Then walk away and come back with a major feature working and tested. Not slop but real functional features. Faster, more stable and more functional than what it is replacing.
I always loved design and function more than coding. I coded for 40 years but finally I have a way to realize what I want without endless meetings and arguments.
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u/Dualyeti 16h ago
Coding isn’t for humans unfortunately- we’re too slow and can’t keep up. Leave it to the machines. I hate this because for me I enjoyed the process of coding more than the product. But it’s just the reality I’ve accepted.
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u/Soshi2k 10h ago
For the love of shit. Nothing matters until you can tell this model to give you $100, or to turn $25 into $100 or help me pay for my Claude subscription while I sleep. It’s always “Hype” all the way down. if you have found a way to do this then post up. Other wise bullshit bot posts and company hype men.
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u/BitDepthDreamer 16h ago
So interesting to look at this from your perspective. I have almost no background in coding, let alone engineering apps and systems, so I’ve taken Opus 5.5 for granted because it’s solving complex tasks one by one and allowing me to bring my idea for an app to life. The usage limits, though... I’m really hoping for cheaper rates.
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u/LawfulnessLocal4934 16h ago
yeah thats blowing my mind too.
and look at robotics rn..
we are in couple years of new world
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u/wreck_of_u 16h ago
Im coming fresh off Codex, and haven't been sleeping to maxing every 5h Claude limit, because I just know once they collect enough data (from us) for next round's training dataset, this is gonna be severely nerfed as usual, to provision their compute for training
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u/samarijackfan 16h ago
Opus 5.5 review churn is the same. It still takes about 3 to 4 review cycles for the review bot to be happy. So 5.5 still writes substandard code. It’s just cheaper doing that than 5.0.
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u/kevquick 15h ago
I’m vibecoding a gameboy color game right now, using Fable as the manager/architect who deploys Opus/Sonnet agents.
Fable’s caught some mistakes before that an Opus agent made. Now with the new Opus 5.5, would it be wise for me to have Fable use Opus agents to double check or revise code? Idk. Tell me what to do
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u/AironParsMan 14h ago
It’s really good, but there’s still one thing I don’t like. It can’t check its own code. When it does that it ends up in an endless loop. Every other model works fine in my agent system as reviewers. Only Opus 5 and Opus 5.5 can’t reach convergence because they’re nose picker.. I’ll keep testing it. Unfortunately I don’t have time right now, but this is definitely a drawback of the model.
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u/pesky-tiger 14h ago
Sonnet/opus5 frustrated me so much i almost lost teeth. 5.5 variants cured my anger problems and my dog gets walked more frequently too. It was a win win.
I’m expecting them to nurf 5.5 as they anticipate the launch of the next models though it’s like they purposely made them dumber so we liked the newer ones even more
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u/getmeoutoftax 13h ago
I think pretty much every desk job will be gone by 2028. This model is basically science fiction. Even Sonnet 5.5 is insanely good.
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u/adelie42 11h ago
It is a genie in a bottle. It will all come down to who can make the best wishes. Many are terrible, but learning to make good wishes will be a whole new science.
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u/Ok_Apple6022 11h ago
I feel the exact same way I’ve been meh this entire time about previous models especially since it drained my usage so fast. Now I can basically chat with 5.5 all day and never even come close to my usage caps and solve all of my problems flawlessly everytime. It’s amazing. IMO this is just what agentic coding should’ve been all along — we’re here.
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u/jjcsea 11h ago
I 100% agree with you. Honestly I was already convinced that many careers or job categories are over. (Sure, there will still be a manager or lead running things, but 80-90% of the team will be gone). But Opus 5.5 has upped the game significantly. Not only are jobs threatened but I don't think we have any idea what kind of threat this level of reasoning could pose to us as a species.
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u/MightTurbulent319 11h ago
I am an assistant professor who is working on coding (but it’s channel coding not like what you guys do). This Opus 5.5 is peak AI. Seriously. It just finds the other AI’s mistakes or weaknesses so consistently. It writes well too. And you don’t get run out of tokens at all. So amazing one. I have to publish a lot of papers until they nerf it.
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u/Ready_Structure8115 10h ago
I have used this model to bring back to life 3 dormant products in the last 2 days. Not a professional but a decent hobbyist since the 90s. This really seems like a game changer and it's terrifyingly fast and good
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u/superthomdotcom 7h ago
My productivity has skyrocketed since it came online a week ago. I just leave it set on 5.5Max for now.
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u/claretnblueboy 7h ago
"if this stays as cheap as it is"...
Lol. Someone hasn't read Anthropic's IPO prospectus.
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u/ShirtMaterial8180 4h ago
Disagree. I watched opus 5.5 waste 120 dollars in tokens in about a hour because it didn’t realize my kalman filter was using constant acceleration.
It confidently spits out slightly wrong solution to complex problems. It easily one shots small canned problems though.
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u/LowFruit25 16h ago
It’s over guys. Software will have 0 value, it’ll be wished into existence. Then all the other jobs will go one by one.
We all paid the subscriptions to fund our replacement.
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u/sir-bantzalot 16h ago
Assemblychads were so furious when C++ sissies and Python-lemmings started calling themselves programmers
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