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Alright, AI bros, follow-up from last week. I was able to secure access to Claude Opus 4.6 at my job, and I gave it the same prompt that I had given to Sonnet. It overlooked the authentication part of the HTTP client library completely this time in what it generated. In a follow-up I asked it to extract out the common logic for the authentication portions specifically. It didn't do that, instead it generated a class with two helper methods.
The first helper method was just a thin wrapper around System.Text.Json for deserializing the response. There's an optional flag to pass in for when case insensitive deserialization is needed, and nothing else.
The second helper method was something for actually making the HTTP calls. The strangest part with this one is that it has two delegates as parameters, one for deserializing successful responses, the other for handling (but not deserializing) error responses. It didn't do anything to split out handling of the 2 different ways to authenticate at all.
The issues with what was generated (for both the API client as a whole, and for the authentication part of the code specifically) are numerous, here are a small handful that I identified:
It assumes that an HTTP 200 code is the only successful response code, even though some endpoints return 202, 207, and more.
It assumes that all endpoints return plaintext or JSON content, even though several return binary data, CSV data, etc.
It didn't do null checking in several places. I assume it was mostly trained on C# code that either didn't do null checks correctly, and/or on code that doesn't use the nullable reference type feature that was added in C# 8 (back in 2019). Regardless, the null checks are missing/wrong regardless of whether nullable reference types are enabled or disabled. Also it always checks nulls with == or != null. This works 99% of the time, but best practice is to use "is null" and "is not null" for the rare cases where the equality operator is overloaded. Once again, I assume this is because most of the training data uses == and !=.
It doesn't handle url query parameters (nor path parameters), it assumes everything is going to use a JSON body for the request.
It uses the wrong logging templates for several of the logging calls. For example, the logs for an error response use the log template for logging the requests that are sent. Even more troubling is that it removed all the logic for stripping user secrets out of these logs.
There are quite a few more issues, but overall my experience with Opus was even worse than my experience with Sonnet, if anything. AI bros still in shambles. I definitely have zero fears that AI will replace me, though I'm still definitely fearful that retarded C-suite execs will think it can replace me.
My post from last week about using Claude Sonnet: https://www.themotte.org/post/3654/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/426666?context=8#context
Edit: Just saw a very relevant post over on Orange Reddit about this very topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47660925
Yeah I've been having some issues with Opus too recently as compared to Sonnet, probably they downgraded everyone since a new model is coming out soonish and they want more compute for that.
But I'm still getting good work done with it, working on a 100K LOC strategy game, which is not exactly boilerplate webdev slop. It is eminently possible to do pretty complex things with AI coding.
Why don't you tell it what exactly you've been finding that's wrong, update the memory file, have a correction pass go over it or do something a little more sophisticated in your orchestration instead of bitching about it online?
This 'I was able to secure access to Claude Opus 4.6 at my job, and I gave it the same prompt that I had given to Sonnet' sounds like you're just trying to one-shot it. You try, review, adjust, try again, have it go in from another angle and then it works.
You don't see me complaining about bugs it gives me, units chasing eachother such that they exit the map. I see a bug, I note it down, I fix it and try and work on a way to avoid similar things happening again.
There's a cavernous gulf between 'lived experiences' here, ironically this is what the motte is kind of for. It's self-evident to me that AI coding is great and effective, whereas it's self-evident to you that it isn't.
As a ln enjoyer of strategy games, what do you mean by 100k LOC? Is that a financial term, I haven't heard it before.
Edit: you probably mean line of credit? Whats the game about?
Lines of code.
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