1,188 karma · joined March 2, 2018
this a thousand times this
LLMs are information transformers. if you're trying to take some rough idea and blow it out into something that "feels" substantive, you're just combining your high-signal idea / prompt with a bunch of meaningless bloat and noise from the model weights.
i will look into how easy it would be to zip up some subset of the results without leaking anything...probably doable
yes the labs will always prioritize the vibeslop dopamine casino as far as I can tell - making the models useful and addictive for unsophisticated users, sometimes at the expense or at the very least at the ignorance of the needs of power users
For readability specifically, I've found it hard to get the models to do this with prompting. If you've talked to opus/fable for a long time on prose writing you probably felt this too
this is a nicely succinct way to put this - a multi-dimensional space where no single metric is really useful
state space of the system is interesting too. I would guess that for any production software with dependencies like databases/third parties that might be too hard to measure, but if you can silo off parts of your system into bounded state machines, it may be a value metric on some module behind a clean interface.
I think the kubernetes control loop model is a great instance of this, a handful of scoped components that own a control loop across a well-defined state machine, that can operate / recover in the face of most network partitions or downtime - the promise of CRDTs but rather more a pragmatic approach to it
I did find opus 5 quite handy for general knowledge work and visual design, without the cost of fable (e.g. the graphics in this post are made by opus 5)
but its not noticeably better than opus 4.8 in those regards, and I would not miss it if forced to go back to 4.8
> fetch this article for slopcodebench and help me run an eval on a subset of problems with opus 5 https://arxiv.org/html/2603.24755v1 > Get all the context, fetch any mentioned repos, and then propose a plan to me.
> i have an anthropic API key in .... > Let's do the three challenges with Opus 4.8 and Opus 5 and Fable please. I like your minimal set. Let's try it. What do you need from me?
> Actually I changed my mind. I want to do two of the easy ones you picked and then I want you to pick the one with more checkpoints, maybe one of the harder ones, not the very hardest one but one with a higher number of checkpoints.
> Actually let's do one easy, one medium, and one hard problem please. If we have a hard problem I'd like to see that.
> lets rock - i think lets just do opus 4.8 and sonnet 5 and opus 5 since we our ZDR will block fable
I'm hoping to do some more work with sol/fable in the mix as well as exploring more languages and curating the problem set to include more of the benchmark
I also kinda felt like opus4.5 was dumber than 4.1 personally, maybe a little biased since 4.5 was 2.5x faster and 2.5x cheaper seems to indicate its a smaller model
lights off is still out for me
generic prompting like "review this code" or "make the architecture better" will raise the floor but cannot come close to human-quality code without humans understanding what code exists and what to ask for.
Obviously cursor and other labs have a stake in this going one direction, but I don't buy it, and I don't think you should either.
In fact, "Rebuild sqlite from spec" has all the problems with every other benchmark that I cited - model knows the whole problem up front and never has to iterate on the pile of slop it created cheating its way to a solution.
In any case, politely, I think we're mostly arguing vibes here and I'm not sure its going to get anywhere.
from the footnotes (sorry if this got a little buried)
> yes of course you can get gpt-5.5 xhigh to do BRILLIANT refactors. But you had to tell it to do that. And to tell it to do that you had to understand your codebase well enough to know it needed doing. We're here talking about why lights-off wont work
i suppose this would also be a good place to ask if you fall in the "high stakes production systems" camp
> If you love vibe coding, please, go on vibing. I still vibe code lots of things, I just also maintain lots of production software (and through HumanLayer, help 1000s of other engineers do the same), so the rest of this is aimed at folks solving hard problems in complex codebases.