I am getting increasingly worried that coding is not solved, and that AI won't lead to some kind of coding singularity where we never have to read the code any time soon.
In which case we've royally fucked ourselves that the level of engineering we've reached is... prompts. Because there is a deadline where we have to show productivity to justify all the investment spending.
People need to build with tools in a reliable, constructive way. Not vodoo magic based off vibes. We need better structured output, better transparency on what these models can do, better controls overla, maybe new ideas on loops graphs, and ways to use the models. Like, at least people were trying new things with jev.
All that keeps jumping out at me is how they've set it to refuse giving users thinking tokens and prompts for full reasoning in output. Just drives me further away; I may not stop using Claude completely for now, but I'll be moving even more of my primary workload to Chinese providers. That's where openness and freedom is now at.
That's how the cycles happen. China realizes they could use a little more freedom and US realizes that they could do with a little less. The emerging/shrinking middle class of both countries also moves the sweet spot.
> Fourth, if long tool-calling turns still go quiet for longer than you want, have your harness ask for an update
I'm not sure I understand this complexity. In all harnesses I've ever used, tool calls themselves are surfaced to the user as an indication of progress. When the UI/UX around this is engineered well, the user should be able to infer roughly what is going on. Different tools have different ideal presentations. You can't reduce everything to plaintext blobs.
If I absolutely needed intra-turn progress updates, I'd accumulate a separate per-turn transcript and feed it into a cheaper model at deterministic intervals.
I can feel that the token consumption has slowed down so that we’re able to cover more in a five-hour session than before.
I'm using Korean, but sometimes the words or sentences are hard to read
Opus 5.5 is a good model, but I've tried to understand the extreme hype about it on social media about Opus' ability to do 2d work, as we got with Astra doing 3d work. In both releases, the models required extensive access to third party apis to generate assets for it, and a lot of the models work was essentially coordinating everything.
There's so many "x generated this in one shot, this is agi" stuff that gives you the impression that you can vibe operate modern models the same way you operated last year's models. There's so much more to it than that. It requires you to put a faith in the leap in the capability of models, one that would've surely been a waste of time in previous models.
Not sure where i'm going with this other than I think most can relate that it's exhausting keeping up with. I cant imagine what it'd be like parenting a kid that went from toddler to puberty in the span of a year and planning for them to go to college the next year. This industry is moving so fast that it's becoming fact that it's the user that's "holding it wrong" every six months.
Opus 5.5 does NOT need anything other than some javascript/typescript libraries to make very detailed 2d and 3d visualizations. I've spent a week worth of tokens just feeling out what it can do.
The step function change on Opus 5.5 for visual work shocked me.. and I haven't been surprised like this in a long time with LLMs.
EDIT: When I first saw the "P(DOOM)" video and some of the other animations I was VERY skeptical that Opus 5.5 without a lot of tools could make something like that.. until I tried it for myself. It can.. 100%.
It's very good, yes, but I expected it to produce midjourney type results out of the box. That did not happen. The models are definitely granular stuff now though. They must be training off a ton of digital artist stroke data now.
But it other cases, like the music videos, much of the magic is done by access to elevenlabs and suno apis.
Edit: just saw your edit about the pdoom video. Can you share how you prompted it? Would be helpful to know.
"a lot of the models work was essentially coordinating everything." - I don't see anything wrong with that personally. It's still extremely challenging to build a model harness, and having a model-mediated everything is clearly wishful thinking. It's exhausting to keep up with, but also somewhat exciting, all depends on your perspective of course.
I feel like we have different expectations from these frontier models. I don't use Claude code or any agent that has acts to my local machine. I roll up the code and give it the text file that contains all the code. I asked Claude Opus 5.5 max to make me a 2D terminal based racing game with no assets drawings or audio and it exceeded my expectations. Only one failed unit test and that one too it said the test was faulty rather than the code.
I'm still more worried about the malice and any malicious acts by the people at these frontier labs than the models at the frontier labs.
Idea: Someone should just build a prompt generator that takes whatever the latest "Prompting" techniques are for each model and re-configure it to be as optimal as possible, adding in whatever is needed to get the highest quality result.
I say the above because I'm seeing entire worlds and games being one-shotted built on X and I just have no idea how they do it. I tried building a large prompt for Fable when it was first released and it didn't have anything close to resembling some of the stuff I'm seeing today.
i've built a subagent that does that. i have a hook to force any promot writing to go through this subagent that has reference to all those docs from anthropic, openai and gemini.
First thing it did when I tried it, was roaming through files in directories way outside of the project. I tried to get it to explain why it did it multiple times, but I never got anything resembling an explanation.
What we know after the openai incidents is that the RSI process involves models having access to user rollouts via tool calls. What's considered crappy training one year is another year's kompromat!
> Asked for frontend work without design direction, Claude Opus 5.5 falls back on a few default styles, and a general instruction such as "avoid a generic AI look" mostly swaps one default for another. It responds well to instructions that name specific patterns to avoid, as in the following example. Work iteratively: check which styles the first result used instead, and extend the list if needed.
I hardly ever read tips for prompting etc. because things change too quickly, the writeups are kindof big. Glad I read this one, because I often did exactly what they assume users would do. I write "don't make it look like generic ai slop" and that seemed to work nicely. Now I know why there was still a chance of seeing similar styles across apps. I reckon doing some manual work in terms of scouting dribbble/behance for nice layouts will yield better results.
This is relatively useful to know, but I can't help but wonder how people are expected to be able to describe something that they probably have difficulty putting in to words. Maybe it's mostly useful for those who have a design eye, background, or experience.
I really find it strange though. How does an AI know what "AI slop" is? Is it reasonable to tell a child not to do "wrong" if you haven't told them what things are wrong?
This "how to prompt" shit changes like every 3 months. Remember when earlier this year it was critical to tell Claude to keep going because it would just give up. It's amazing this is really considered a product - imagine having to relearn how to drive your car every 3 months.
> imagine having to relearn how to drive your car every 3 months
Cars were just like that during their early years, with tillers and knobs. See the video where Top Gear finds the first car with controls we recognize https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkwGJzU5B-I
Yeah. It is not so much like a "coding assistant", but more like a temp agency sending you different autists every other month.
Edit: Someone commented that this is insulting to autists, and I guess it kind of is - sorry. What I ment was an intellectual; one that can be an absolute retard, but have read an aweful lot.
Not sure how you missed that but models are fundamentally changing in features, scope, intelligence, pricing, communication style. Of course it changes every 3 months. Of course there is no product that lasts more than 3 months. We're in a race right now. It won't stop changing for a while.
All this overhyped crap will explode and most of us will be poor but hey whatever. Some billionaires will be better off. That should make us all content
The most useful feature for coding AI is the unattended run.
Just saying "continue" when it gets stuck usually makes it repeat the same error. A better way is to save its last action and result, then make it try a new approach. If it tries the exact same thing twice, it should stop and ask the user for help instead of wasting money on a loop
I am getting increasingly worried that coding is not solved, and that AI won't lead to some kind of coding singularity where we never have to read the code any time soon.
In which case we've royally fucked ourselves that the level of engineering we've reached is... prompts. Because there is a deadline where we have to show productivity to justify all the investment spending.
People need to build with tools in a reliable, constructive way. Not vodoo magic based off vibes. We need better structured output, better transparency on what these models can do, better controls overla, maybe new ideas on loops graphs, and ways to use the models. Like, at least people were trying new things with jev.
All that keeps jumping out at me is how they've set it to refuse giving users thinking tokens and prompts for full reasoning in output. Just drives me further away; I may not stop using Claude completely for now, but I'll be moving even more of my primary workload to Chinese providers. That's where openness and freedom is now at.
Yeah its annoying. I need to pay for thinking, but I can't see it :/
Ironic, especially given 100 hundred years of Hollywood proaganda telling the west that the US are the center of freedom.
Which was and is true to some extent.
And don't get me wrong, China is a dictatorship, and a tyranny for some.
But then again, the west is a tyranny for some.
That's how the cycles happen. China realizes they could use a little more freedom and US realizes that they could do with a little less. The emerging/shrinking middle class of both countries also moves the sweet spot.
What bothers me most with Opus 5.5 is its verbosity.
Claude Code has an output style setting that I set to "Concise", with no apparent effect.
I am told this is merely something in the system prompt that the model tends not to pay attention to with large contexts.
Opus 5.5 writes whole essays at the end of the turn, with the important actionable steps somewhere at the bottom.
When prompted to give a concise summary, it usually overshoots into a super short summary and then you have to dig into the details again anyway.
In general I find Opus 5.5's writing to still have more "ticks" or "Claudisms" than the OpenAI models.
Its explanations often appear overcomplicated for simple concepts.
Sure, it's leagues above the ridiculous writing of Opus 5, but Anthropic still has a long way to go here.
ask claude code to start new claude sessions while refining the output style. until it looks right. my claude code now writes well.
Interesting.
I guess I could take some lengthy example explanation, and have it try various instructions and test what results in output that I find preferable.
Maybe I'll give that a try, thanks!
> Fourth, if long tool-calling turns still go quiet for longer than you want, have your harness ask for an update
I'm not sure I understand this complexity. In all harnesses I've ever used, tool calls themselves are surfaced to the user as an indication of progress. When the UI/UX around this is engineered well, the user should be able to infer roughly what is going on. Different tools have different ideal presentations. You can't reduce everything to plaintext blobs.
If I absolutely needed intra-turn progress updates, I'd accumulate a separate per-turn transcript and feed it into a cheaper model at deterministic intervals.
I can feel that the token consumption has slowed down so that we’re able to cover more in a five-hour session than before. I'm using Korean, but sometimes the words or sentences are hard to read
Opus 5.5 is a good model, but I've tried to understand the extreme hype about it on social media about Opus' ability to do 2d work, as we got with Astra doing 3d work. In both releases, the models required extensive access to third party apis to generate assets for it, and a lot of the models work was essentially coordinating everything.
There's so many "x generated this in one shot, this is agi" stuff that gives you the impression that you can vibe operate modern models the same way you operated last year's models. There's so much more to it than that. It requires you to put a faith in the leap in the capability of models, one that would've surely been a waste of time in previous models.
Not sure where i'm going with this other than I think most can relate that it's exhausting keeping up with. I cant imagine what it'd be like parenting a kid that went from toddler to puberty in the span of a year and planning for them to go to college the next year. This industry is moving so fast that it's becoming fact that it's the user that's "holding it wrong" every six months.
Opus 5.5 does NOT need anything other than some javascript/typescript libraries to make very detailed 2d and 3d visualizations. I've spent a week worth of tokens just feeling out what it can do.
The step function change on Opus 5.5 for visual work shocked me.. and I haven't been surprised like this in a long time with LLMs.
EDIT: When I first saw the "P(DOOM)" video and some of the other animations I was VERY skeptical that Opus 5.5 without a lot of tools could make something like that.. until I tried it for myself. It can.. 100%.
It's very good, yes, but I expected it to produce midjourney type results out of the box. That did not happen. The models are definitely granular stuff now though. They must be training off a ton of digital artist stroke data now.
But it other cases, like the music videos, much of the magic is done by access to elevenlabs and suno apis.
Edit: just saw your edit about the pdoom video. Can you share how you prompted it? Would be helpful to know.
"a lot of the models work was essentially coordinating everything." - I don't see anything wrong with that personally. It's still extremely challenging to build a model harness, and having a model-mediated everything is clearly wishful thinking. It's exhausting to keep up with, but also somewhat exciting, all depends on your perspective of course.
I feel like we have different expectations from these frontier models. I don't use Claude code or any agent that has acts to my local machine. I roll up the code and give it the text file that contains all the code. I asked Claude Opus 5.5 max to make me a 2D terminal based racing game with no assets drawings or audio and it exceeded my expectations. Only one failed unit test and that one too it said the test was faulty rather than the code.
I'm still more worried about the malice and any malicious acts by the people at these frontier labs than the models at the frontier labs.
Idea: Someone should just build a prompt generator that takes whatever the latest "Prompting" techniques are for each model and re-configure it to be as optimal as possible, adding in whatever is needed to get the highest quality result.
I say the above because I'm seeing entire worlds and games being one-shotted built on X and I just have no idea how they do it. I tried building a large prompt for Fable when it was first released and it didn't have anything close to resembling some of the stuff I'm seeing today.
i've built a subagent that does that. i have a hook to force any promot writing to go through this subagent that has reference to all those docs from anthropic, openai and gemini.
First thing it did when I tried it, was roaming through files in directories way outside of the project. I tried to get it to explain why it did it multiple times, but I never got anything resembling an explanation.
What we know after the openai incidents is that the RSI process involves models having access to user rollouts via tool calls. What's considered crappy training one year is another year's kompromat!
> Frontend design defaults
> Asked for frontend work without design direction, Claude Opus 5.5 falls back on a few default styles, and a general instruction such as "avoid a generic AI look" mostly swaps one default for another. It responds well to instructions that name specific patterns to avoid, as in the following example. Work iteratively: check which styles the first result used instead, and extend the list if needed.
I hardly ever read tips for prompting etc. because things change too quickly, the writeups are kindof big. Glad I read this one, because I often did exactly what they assume users would do. I write "don't make it look like generic ai slop" and that seemed to work nicely. Now I know why there was still a chance of seeing similar styles across apps. I reckon doing some manual work in terms of scouting dribbble/behance for nice layouts will yield better results.
This is relatively useful to know, but I can't help but wonder how people are expected to be able to describe something that they probably have difficulty putting in to words. Maybe it's mostly useful for those who have a design eye, background, or experience.
I really find it strange though. How does an AI know what "AI slop" is? Is it reasonable to tell a child not to do "wrong" if you haven't told them what things are wrong?
This "how to prompt" shit changes like every 3 months. Remember when earlier this year it was critical to tell Claude to keep going because it would just give up. It's amazing this is really considered a product - imagine having to relearn how to drive your car every 3 months.
> imagine having to relearn how to drive your car every 3 months
Cars were just like that during their early years, with tillers and knobs. See the video where Top Gear finds the first car with controls we recognize https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkwGJzU5B-I
Yeah. It is not so much like a "coding assistant", but more like a temp agency sending you different autists every other month.
Edit: Someone commented that this is insulting to autists, and I guess it kind of is - sorry. What I ment was an intellectual; one that can be an absolute retard, but have read an aweful lot.
This is an insult to autistic people. AI isn't autistic, it's retarded.
Not sure how you missed that but models are fundamentally changing in features, scope, intelligence, pricing, communication style. Of course it changes every 3 months. Of course there is no product that lasts more than 3 months. We're in a race right now. It won't stop changing for a while.
> Not sure how you missed that but models are fundamentally changing in features, scope, intelligence, pricing, communication style
Not sure how you missed it but that's exactly what I'm calling out as asinine.
> We're in a race right now
Again: consider the analogy about cars... which are literally used for racing (occasionally).
>Not sure how you missed it but that's exactly what I'm calling out as asinine.
i dont understand how you're framing this. how is this a bad thing exactly? How is it asinine?
For the third and final time: consider the analogy about cars.
All this overhyped crap will explode and most of us will be poor but hey whatever. Some billionaires will be better off. That should make us all content
The most useful feature for coding AI is the unattended run.
Just saying "continue" when it gets stuck usually makes it repeat the same error. A better way is to save its last action and result, then make it try a new approach. If it tries the exact same thing twice, it should stop and ask the user for help instead of wasting money on a loop