> Just because you were late to the party doesn't mean all of us were.

It wasn't a party I liked back in 2023. I'm just repeating the same stuff I see said over and over again here, but there has been a step change with Opus 4.5.

You can still it in action now because the other models are still where Opus was at a while ago. I recently needed to make small change to script I was using. It is a tiny (50 line) script written with the help of AI's ages ago, but was subtly wrong in so many ways. It's now become clear neither the AI's (I used several and cross checked) nor myself had a clue about what we were dealing with. The current "seems to work" version was created after much blood caused by misunderstandings was spilt, exposing bugs that had to be fixed.

I asked Claude 4.6 to fix yet another misunderstanding, and the result was a patch changing the minimum number of lines to get the job done. Just reviewing such a surgical modification was far easier than doing it myself.

I gave exactly the same prompt to Gemini. The result was a wholesale rearrangement of the code. Maybe it was good, but the effort to verify that was far lager than just doing it myself. It was a very 2023 experience.

The usual 2023 experience for me was ask an AI write some greenfield code, and get a result that looked like someone had changed variable names in something they found on the web after a brief search for code that looked like it might do a similar job. If you got lucky, it might have found something that was indeed very similar, but in my case that was rare. Asking it to modify code unlike something it had seen before was like asking someone to poke your eyes with a stick.

As I said, some of the organisers of this style of party seem have gotten their act together, so now it is well worth joining their parties. But this is a newish development.