Comment by TeriyakiBomb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeriyakiBomb | Hacker News Reader

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Thing is. You can find an extremely similar paragraph written about Claude 4.x or some equivalent gpt. And simultaneously, many people expressing their frustration and the shortcomings of <insert any model>

“But it’s different this time” - several people, several times over the last couple of years.

This is not at all a dig at you, I’m very sorry if it reads that way. My point is these things only get truly better in anecdotes. The ways in which they fail is yet to change. Just yesterday I had gpt 5.3 generate completely awful code for the Cinema 4D Python API. Also an anecdote. But for all of the people saying they are truly intelligent and truly reason, they still make obvious mistakes, write around problems, fail entirely at architectural decisions, fail at random, generate FAR too much code.

And no amount of harnesses, methodologies, loops make much of a difference. If you listen to people on the internet they say it’s all working. You listen to people on the job and they mostly say it’s creating tech debt and a review bottleneck. Also burnout, so much burnout.

I think LLMs are mediocre. I think it’s fine they’re mediocre. You can work with low expectations. But the hype cycles are so tiresome.

I don't buy into the huge LLM hype but I certainly think late 2025 was the inflection point. Up until then, I thought LLMs universally sucked at code. GPT-3.5, GPT-4, o1, o3, Claude 3.5, Sonnet 4, the whole bunch. Each iteration got marginally better, hallucinated APIs less and so on, but my overall evaluation of them all was that they wrote crap code and were unsuitable for anything other than one-off scripts.

Then the incremental improvements did, in my experience, cross some kind of threshold in late 2025 where the things became useful. It is of course anecdotal and personal judgment. But I asked LLMs to implement a small feature in my codebase (my usual test) and finally it produced code I was happy with. They've also been able to locate and diagnose a problem based on logs. In my view it's now a markedly different level of capability than we had a year ago, though I would call the previous two years equally useless.

You can find an extremely similar paragraph written about Claude 4.x or some equivalent gpt

Yes, as a product gradually improves there will always be many people for whom version X didn't work well for them and version X+1 does. It turns out that Opus 4.5 and GPT 5.1 were larger than average improvements that cross that threshold for a significant number of people.

My point is these things only get truly better in anecdotes. The ways in which they fail is yet to change.

If your claim is that there's no substantive difference between Sonnet 3.5 and Fable, then we live in very different worlds.

LLM capabilities are spiky. They're amazing at some things, and poor at others. Over time, the set of things they're amazing at has grown, while the set of things they're poor at has shrunk. If you think LLMs are just "mediocre" without any nuance, that's a sign you haven't spent the time to evaluate them in order to make an informed opinion.

> You can find an extremely similar paragraph written about Claude 4.x or some equivalent gpt

Even 3.7. I remember when it came out and people were claiming that that was now the model that was going to replace engineers. Cue Fable years later and people still claim that this one is the one.

GPT-5.3 is a last-generation model (which is wild to say when it came out in February this year, but it's true).

How does GPT-5.6 Sol or Claude Fable 5 or Claude Opus 5 do on that Cinema 4D code?

I believe it is a widely accepted opinion that agentic coding took off with Opus 4.5 late in 2025.

Why would you attempt to use GPT 5.3 to generate code today and form an opinion on that basis?

I do not think it is even still available in Codex, I believe it only has the smaller, distilled GPT 5.3 Codex Spark.

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