extr

Honestly do not care that the words are vaguely AI tinted. The semantic content is not AI, it's not slop.

Put it this way: would you rather this article didn't exist, or had less detail? Because that's the alternative in many cases.

I like the way you put this. I agree this is where the frontier of software development is right now. You can have LLM chug and bug fix all day long but in the end most real issues are in this layer of intent. I don't think this problem is particular to DB/programming language codebase either - it happens a lot in product design it just doesn't surface in code review. "Everything is working perfectly" yet the resulting workflow or UI is not truly making the user's life easier, or has grown grotesque with additions/modifications.

I will say, if the problem is purely code you occasionally see "sparks of AGI" where the model will step back and say "hold on, there is a massive simplification we can make here...". This started happening with Fable-class models. But rarely if ever will the model push for a huge simplification at the product level.

Truly the GOAT font. Nothing else compares.

I think the knowledge is one level higher at this point. It’s not LazyLoading that you need to know about, it’s just that it can and should be faster. That you can demand more (and sometimes you can’t). It’s hard to know the difference when you’re not in your area of expertise.

Fair point on the contradiction. I don’t have the answers either.

Well, that’s true to an extent, but sometimes you need to ”play” a bit before you (or the model) can “work”, if that makes sense. And it’s hard to know the right kind of “play” without experience in the area, this is something the models can’t yet do.

I go back and forth on this. For awhile yes it took a lot of workflow tweaks and finesse to get directionally correct outputs (thinking back like mid 2025). I invested time in figuring that out, mostly because I was interested, but those skills are all obsolete now, you don't need to worry so much about context management and special instruction recipes or anything these days.

The meta at this point seems to be mostly around "knowing what to ask for". Eg: I suck at prompting for specific design tweaks, because I don't have the design vocabulary to be specific and articulate what I want. It's a lot of trial and error. I hear people who are developing full scale applications without a tech background run into the issue writ large. For now, I have an advantage over these people when building applications. But perhaps that's just one round of RL away from being obsolete too. Supposedly the model will eventually have such good taste in design/architecture/whatever there will be little point in asking for tweaks.

The only thing that seems relatively future-proof is just being able to communicate clearly what you're trying to do. Not how to do it, or even what success looks like. Perhaps an element of it is even as basic as being honest with yourself.

Yeah I remember when the original post about this came out. Def not recent. Though I think their point survives in that they didn't exactly RL on this.

I agree. I don't necessarily "trust" Anthropic and OpenAI when it comes to CC/Codex respectively, but I respect that they have immense internal resources and telemetry to be able to understand what features move the needle and nudge traces in the right direction. I don't understand how non-labs judge feature inclusion? Just vibes?

IDK with Opus 5.5 it does kind of feel like it's solved.

It's a great model and you're right it does feel quite natural at times while Fable 5.1 still has a claude-ish shape to it. Unfortunately I just find that it's not reliable enough as a daily driver and ends up performing specialist tasks rather than being the primary pane of glass.

I used to do this but recently I switched to having Fable 5.1 spawn forks of itself rather than Opus subagents. Yes it's more expensive but you don't pay for reads that already happened pre-fork, and you end up doing less rework since Fable agents are just much smarter.

- It doesn't write great code.

- Occasionally has strange tics around asking for permission for obvious next-steps, implied actions, etc.

- It's very expensive, both in terms of tokens and % usage on subscription plans.

- Relatedly, effort level is unintuitive. Sometimes it seems like higher effort levels are actually cheaper due to not under-thinking and needing to correct work. But other times they are overkill and send the model into rabbitholes.

That said, it's fantastic as a code-reviewer or "hunter seeker". It's better at finding bugs than Fable and "Get this well articulated task done single-mindedly" is an Astra-shaped task.

I just tell everyone to use Fable 5.1 for everything at this point. Astra is unfortunately a dud, I'm sure they will try to fix a bunch of it with GPT-6.1 but OAI has had this issue for awhile now where every other generation has some sort of strange tic, or reward hacking issue, or something. It's almost like they are balancing the RL on the tip of a needle.

Opus 5 has issues too, comment-slop, claude-ish, etc.

5.1 on the other hand can seemingly do no wrong. Easy to work with, writes human-level code. Expensive, yes, but even at Low effort it's well worth it.