Essential Guide: Opus 4.5 Is Not The Normal AI Agent Experience That I Have Had Thus...

If you had asked me three months ago about these statements, I would have said only someone who’s never built anything non-trivial would believe they’re true. Great for augmenting a developer’s existing workflow, and completions are powerful, but agents replacing developers entirely? No. Absolutely not.

Today, I think that AI coding agents can absolutely replace developers. And the reason that I believe this is Claude Opus 4.5.

And by “normal”, I mean that it is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far. So far, AI Agents seem to be pretty good at writing spaghetti code and after 9 rounds of copy / paste errors into the terminal and “fix it” have probably destroyed my codebase to the extent that I’ll be throwing this whole chat session out and there goes 30 minutes I’m never getting back.

Opus 4.5 feels to me like the model that we were promised - or rather the promise of AI for coding actually delivered.

One of the toughest things about writing that last sentence is that the immediate response from you should be, “prove it”. So let me show you what I’ve been able to build.

I first noticed that Opus 4.5 was drastically different when I used it to build a Windows utility to right-click an image and convert it to different file types. This was basically a one shot build after asking Opus the best way to add a right-click menu to the file explorer.

What amazed me through the process of building this was Opus 4.5 ability to get most things right on the first try. And if it ran into errors, it would try and build using the dotnet CLI, read the errors and iterate until fixed. The only issue I had was Opus inability to see XAML errors, which I used Visual Studio to see and copy / paste back into the agent.

Opus built a site for me to distribute it and handled the bundling of the executable so as to use a powershell script for the install, uninstall. It also built the GitHub Actions which do the release and update the landing page so that all I have to do is push source.

The only place I had to use other tools was for the logo - where I used Figma’s AI to generate a bunch of different variations - but then Opus wrote the scripts to convert that SVG to the right formats for icons, even store distribution if I chose to do so.

Now this is admittedly not a complex application. This is a small Windows utility that is doing basically one thing. It’s not like I asked Opus 4.5 to build Photoshop.

Source: HackerNews