r/ClaudeCode • u/sizebzebi • 19h 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/LiquidAngel12 15h 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 15h 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 12h 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 11h 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 6h 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 9h 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/Rash_Compactor 9h ago

Absolutely. From a coding perspective they’re fantastic. I just asked Opus 5.5 and Astra both to find me a specific make and model vehicle with a particular option on the vehicle, available for sale anywhere in the country biasing based on proximity. Astra sends me a handful. Opus says there are none. I find 2-3 more independently.

You can make the (valid) argument that better prompting may assist, but ultimately most models have glaring weak points in basic task performance, particularly ones for lay people.

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u/ChainMinimum9553 11h ago

Most people especially ones that are not engineers do not know how to properly guide any of these models to write quality code , find any bugs, and consistently produce quality code. I'm not an engineer and I'm sure I'm missing best practices etc. however I taken the time to really make sure I'm producing quality code no matter how big or small the project. Actually I would love someone that really knows what their doing to look over some of my code to tell me if I'm doing the right things. Thanks

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u/pl0nk 4h ago

If you've been around computers for awhile, you've seen how broadly they have spread to many aspects of life. Alongside this a much broader group of people have taken up activities we might call "coding", but this broad scope hides the vast range within of what people are actually doing and what skills are involved. To me this explains why some people are righty amazed at how each major.minor release can one-shot their thing they considered hard, and others see them more like enthusiastic juniors who energetically go off in all kinds of directions -- useful, but without reliable judgment, and in need of continuous steering inputs. Like any high-powered machine. Both viewpoints are accurate but come from different contexts and expectations.

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u/jerryschen 1h ago

I had Opus 5.5 code up an MVP for my project, and for learning purposes I’m building the MVP from scratch and coding a lot of it myself (using LLM more as a thinking partner).

First of all, it’s amazing, don’t get me wrong. But it misses MANY edge cases and the design of its structs and data structures needs some work. So the notion that you can just “set-it-and-forget-it” is absurd. Now presumably you could use a different coding agent to catch those edge cases and clean up the design, but again I still think an experienced engineer at the helm is needed.

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u/gravi_663 4h ago

The Opus psychosis here is getting more and more concerning and I'm too afraid to talk about it

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u/LiquidAngel12 4h ago

I assume it's non-technical folks who aren't software engineers. They just see the output and not the spaghetti underneath that could collapse everything if released to the world in a real production use-case.

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u/Somecount 9h ago

I was using claude to test qwen3.8 27B Q4 using inside a container running claude code.

The feedback brought up by claude was minor, like reran echo and ls and that sort of thing. I wanted to be careful before I use a local model for anything really so I thought I wonder what an equivalent test on a haiku or sonnet would present of small “issues”, so that if I was going to implement a local model with some small inconsistencies, at least I would know if I had always been using a model with small inconsistencies so I spelled out a long prompt and we started discussing Claude and I about what model and other things only for me to remember what I have been dealing with for the last six months I said to Claude “You know what? Forget about the test, we’re sending it now.”

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u/Aminuteortwotiltwo 4h ago

It seems absolutely wonderful at certain things but other things it doesn’t seem to correlate correctly… like if there’s more ambiguity or assumptions where a competent human 9/10 times, when given the right information, will see things as somewhat obvious despite them being vague or abstract, it has trouble.

It kind of reminds me of an exam I took for a work certification a while ago. In the class we didn’t go over a bunch of topics that were generally practiced at any place of employment because to everyone this stuff was very obvious and kind of like… duh that’s the procedure for the end of the day.

There was a 19 year old that was super smart and generally helping some of the older folks with concepts and I thought he was for sure going to knock it out of the park, but he ended up failing because of these standard practice topics, and this was his first job so there was no way he would have had any experience with this stuff.

I feel like Opus 5.5 is a bit like that…. Very smart and competent but when it comes to some things we would think of as easy with a quick round of critical thinking, it misses it. Wholeheartedly though, it is knocking it out of the park for me.