alt Hacker NewsI've tried very earnestly to use opus 4.5 to get rid of some backlog tasks that were too tedious to do manually. It turns out that they're still extremely tedious because I have to make every single non trivial decision for the model, unless I don't care one iota about the long term sustainability of the code base. And by long term, I mean more than a week. They're good for saving keystrokes or doing fuzzy searches for me. "Design"? No, that is an anthropomorphism.
I actually had a perfect use case for slopcoding - I needed to scrape a search result and turn it into a csv and a bunch of files.
Totally possible with a hour or so or coding but annoying and not that fun. Completely trivial, tons of stuff like it, piece of cake
Claude got something that looked like it was worked, and didn't. I figured out why, told it what to fix, and it didn't.
Finally after several rounds, it kicked off...and then hung on...something? idk what, it doesn't look like it was rate limited
Also it said the code would check to see it had already downloaded the file and if so, skip it. It definitely did not do that lol
At this point it was 90 minutes--an hour of yelling at the computer and another 30 minutes of my ADHD ass forgetting that I had it running
I like it as fancy autocomplete because it's usually helpful and I can silence it for 20 minutes if it's annoying me, but man.