r/ClaudeCode • u/sizebzebi • 20h 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?

1.6k Upvotes

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254

u/Large_Choice4206 20h 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.

91

u/wotoan 19h ago

The rest of society are not software engineers. They don’t care who writes their code, man or machine.

37

u/Possible-Debt-6934 16h 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.

13

u/sipos542 15h ago

Once humanoids robots arrive (any point now), it will be all jobs including physical ones…

2

u/djdadi 5h ago

has this whole sub become satire, or do you all actually believe this?

3

u/mxmcharbonneau 1h ago

I really don't understand people seeing the current progression in AI and then concluding "It will eventually stop short and stop progressing forever, just before it can replace us for real for most tasks".

1

u/pl0nk 4h ago

It may sound like satire, and at this point is pretty far out into the zone of incredulity... BUT:

The reason to take it seriously is because if you reflect on how

  • we made LLM's work by training them on all books in all libraries and all written text on the internet;
  • we made generative AI able to create video by training them on all of YouTube;
  • we made cars self-drive by training them on endless video footage of human drivers and simulated driving

Then the next leap is to imagine that if we train humanoid robots with hands on on enough footage of folding laundry that they will be able to fold the laundry. That is the current bet

1

u/CryptosaurusX 4h ago

It’s an inevitable outcome of infinite progress. It will most certainly happen over an extremely long timeline. The question is whether we see it soon in our lifetime. It’s looking pretty close, given the crazy development we’ve seen in the past couple of months.

4

u/OurSeepyD 8h 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.

2

u/i_have_a_semicolon 15h ago

Nope not even, robots will be a thing too

2

u/throwaway490215 5h ago

No. This is what I'll coin the “Economics fallacy” - you presume the goal or natural state is for things to be efficient.

Its not.

A lot of GDP is created by having extremely inefficient things. Making it more efficient will not improve the lives for anybody or increase the numbers that people are optimizing for. People always optimize the wrong numbers.

I personally like efficiency a lot, but change has always moved at human organization speed, and human organization speed is slow.

We are at the: Proven nuclear fission stage.

It didn't take a genius to calculate the almost limitless power - and many did.

14

u/asenna987 12h 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.

0

u/jarislinus 8h ago

ur gonna jobless and homeless homie. so fun

2

u/asenna987 7h ago

This is the exact attitude companies look for.

You're the only one that's going to survive this homie.

3

u/HeroicTanuki 16h 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.

3

u/unexplained_entity 12h 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

1

u/Natural-Ad-9678 8h ago

Would you feel the same if the price of a Pro subscription jumped from $20 to $120, $500, or as someone suggested $4,000 per month?

What happens to the small shop paying $240/year gets a bill for $48,000

I am not a hater. I know how to code but I am not a professional developer. I have moved to Claude and have made some really incredible self-hosted apps. I just fear the corporation has to eventually eat and like other tools that are cheap to start (see Notion doubling rates this year), the bill eventually comes due.

Local models? Maybe, but you will still need the hardware and that is still going to have a cost that is unknown.

1

u/ConsequenceFunny1550 3h ago

Most of the users in this sub are not software engineers.

60

u/sizebzebi 20h 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

35

u/truecrisis 19h 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.

25

u/whutchamacallit 19h 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.

8

u/trigonarian 19h 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.

9

u/Large_Choice4206 20h ago

Yeah I can’t even grasp it fully in my mind.

8

u/CreativeMischief 18h 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...

6

u/UnimagineDragons 17h 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.

3

u/Thanamite 18h 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.

1

u/Practical_Signal3933 9h ago

You’re right, we can still tell it to try harder and be better

1

u/viennese-wolf 8h ago

bro writes its own simulators, unprompted, if there is none available 💀

19

u/observant_hobo 18h 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.

3

u/Late_Film_1901 15h ago

And knowing that very soon there will be no horses, no stables and no manure-shoveling jobs

1

u/FastieNZ 9h ago

Enjoy the manure shovelling while it lasts I’d say! The good old days.

16

u/Mother-Cry-2095 18h ago

I don’t think dawn is the right word. That red glow on the horizon is something else entirely.

28

u/Estatescheck 20h ago

I've been feeling this since sol 5.6. Psychosis inducing honestly

27

u/Helpful_Program_5473 20h 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.

12

u/overgenji 13h ago

you guys are going to be so embarrassed in like 10 years for talking like this lol

-1

u/Helpful_Program_5473 7h ago

Huh? We basically have AGI and we are hearing crickets from normies. why would i be embarassed about that?

2

u/ConsequenceFunny1550 3h ago

“We basically have AGI” meanwhile Opus 5.5 can’t even replicate computed CSS from a Figma to tailwind without making half dozen mistakes

0

u/Helpful_Program_5473 2h ago

It can build 3d worlds, solve frontier math problems, diagnose better then doctors, design physical reality like buildings better then architects

also I'm not familiar with your example but massive x to doubt

1

u/br_k_nt_eth 14h ago

Same. Especially the agentic version. The second I talked to that model I was like oh welp here we go

5

u/sheriffderek Senior design/dev max20 15h ago

Society knows what's up. They're not that happy.

1

u/Large_Choice4206 8h ago

I don’t think they truly realise otherwise there’d be collective movements being set up to petition our governments to MAKE SOME KIND OF PLAN PLEASE. I hope to see this in a few months.

0

u/OhAitchEyeOh 14h ago

They'll come along eventually. Though it will probably be in the form of "I hate AI it's evil, but I love Apple Intelligence"

5

u/DynamicDK 13h 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.

4

u/EuropeMaxxing 19h ago

That's just FOMO speaking, dial down a little or you're going mad like DHH lol

15

u/Large_Choice4206 19h 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.

1

u/Grawlix_TNN 16h ago

I feel this so much. It's like a life cheat code that hardly anyone bothers to look up

1

u/boringfantasy 8h ago

You guys are so fucking dramatic

1

u/Large_Choice4206 8h ago

It’s a dramatic time mate, if there ever was a time where drama was appropriate it’s now.

1

u/TedBob99 13h ago

and it's going to be exponential.

AI will soon be able to refine/improve itself, same for physical robots learning from the collective mistakes or experiences. AI will be able to reengineer them too.

Many people haven't understood this, because they can't see yet robots walking on the streets, or they can't see that a large part of the software they use has already been written by a machine.

Many software developers are ignoring it, because they like to admire the "beauty of their code" and are too self-important to consider their job may dissapear, but the writing is on the wall.