Opus 4.5 is the first model that makes me fear for my job

They behave like televangelists

I hear that a lot, but I think this is becoming very different than the crypto grift.

Crypto was just that, a pure grift where they were creating something out of nothing and rugpulling when the hype was highest.

AI is actually creating something, it's generating replacement for artists, for creatives, for musicians, for writers, for programmers. It's literally capable of generating something from _almost_ nothing. Of course, you have to factor in energy usage & etc, but the end user sees none of that. They type a request and it generates an output.

It may be easily identifable slop today, but it's getting better and better at a RAPID rate. We all need to recognize this.

I don't know what to do with the knowledge that it's coming for our jobs. Adapt or die? I don't know...

This exactly. The /r/codex subreddit is equally full of juniors and vibe-coders. In fact, it's surprisingly a ghost-town, given how useful Codex CLI is.

100%. I would also say that this broadly applies to pretty much all of the AI subreddits, and much of AI Twitter as well. Very little nuanced or thoughtful discussions to be found. Looks more like a bunch of people arguing about their favorite sports teams.

It depends. I've been working on a series of large, gnarly refactors at work, and the process has involved writing a (fairly long), hand-crafted spec/policy document. The big advantage of Opus has been that the spec is now machine-executable -- I repeatedly fed it into the LLM and see what it did on some test cases. That sped up experimentation and prototyping tremendously, and it also found a lot of ambiguities in the policy document that were helpful to address.

The document is human-crafted and human-reviewed, and it primarily targets humans. The fact that it works for machines is a (pretty neat) secondary effect, but not really the point. And the document sped up the act of doing the refactors by around 5x.

The whole process was really fun! It's not really vibe coding at that point, really (I continue to be relatively unimpressed at vibe coding beyond a few hundred lines of code). It's closer to old-school waterfall-style development, though with much quicker iteration cycles.

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.

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'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.

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.

You can reach much higher spend through the API (which you can configure `$claude` to use)

I wouldn’t be surprised if this is undisclosed PR from Anthropic