Opus 5.5 is a good model, but I've tried to understand the extreme hype about it on social media about Opus' ability to do 2d work, as we got with Astra doing 3d work. In both releases, the models required extensive access to third party apis to generate assets for it, and a lot of the models work was essentially coordinating everything.

There's so many "x generated this in one shot, this is agi" stuff that gives you the impression that you can vibe operate modern models the same way you operated last year's models. There's so much more to it than that. It requires you to put a faith in the leap in the capability of models, one that would've surely been a waste of time in previous models.

Not sure where i'm going with this other than I think most can relate that it's exhausting keeping up with. I cant imagine what it'd be like parenting a kid that went from toddler to puberty in the span of a year and planning for them to go to college the next year. This industry is moving so fast that it's becoming fact that it's the user that's "holding it wrong" every six months.

Opus 5.5 does NOT need anything other than some javascript/typescript libraries to make very detailed 2d and 3d visualizations. I've spent a week worth of tokens just feeling out what it can do.

The step function change on Opus 5.5 for visual work shocked me.. and I haven't been surprised like this in a long time with LLMs.

EDIT: When I first saw the "P(DOOM)" video and some of the other animations I was VERY skeptical that Opus 5.5 without a lot of tools could make something like that.. until I tried it for myself. It can.. 100%.

"a lot of the models work was essentially coordinating everything." - I don't see anything wrong with that personally. It's still extremely challenging to build a model harness, and having a model-mediated everything is clearly wishful thinking. It's exhausting to keep up with, but also somewhat exciting, all depends on your perspective of course.

This "how to prompt" shit changes like every 3 months. Remember when earlier this year it was critical to tell Claude to keep going because it would just give up. It's amazing this is really considered a product - imagine having to relearn how to drive your car every 3 months.

Not sure how you missed that but models are fundamentally changing in features, scope, intelligence, pricing, communication style. Of course it changes every 3 months. Of course there is no product that lasts more than 3 months. We're in a race right now. It won't stop changing for a while.

Not sure how you missed that but models are fundamentally changing in features, scope, intelligence, pricing, communication style

Not sure how you missed it but that's exactly what I'm calling out as asinine.

We're in a race right now

Again: consider the analogy about cars... which are literally used for racing (occasionally).

Not sure how you missed it but that's exactly what I'm calling out as asinine.

i dont understand how you're framing this. how is this a bad thing exactly? How is it asinine?

For the third and final time: consider the analogy about cars.

Yeah. It is not so much like a "coding assistant", but more like a temp agency sending you different autists every other month.

Edit: Someone commented that this is insulting to autists, and I guess it kind of is - sorry. What I ment was an intellectual; one that can be an absolute retard, but have read an aweful lot.

This is an insult to autistic people. AI isn't autistic, it's retarded.

Frontend design defaults

Asked for frontend work without design direction, Claude Opus 5.5 falls back on a few default styles, and a general instruction such as "avoid a generic AI look" mostly swaps one default for another. It responds well to instructions that name specific patterns to avoid, as in the following example. Work iteratively: check which styles the first result used instead, and extend the list if needed.

I hardly ever read tips for prompting etc. because things change too quickly, the writeups are kindof big. Glad I read this one, because I often did exactly what they assume users would do. I write "don't make it look like generic ai slop" and that seemed to work nicely. Now I know why there was still a chance of seeing similar styles across apps. I reckon doing some manual work in terms of scouting dribbble/behance for nice layouts will yield better results.

This is relatively useful to know, but I can't help but wonder how people are expected to be able to describe something that they probably have difficulty putting in to words. Maybe it's mostly useful for those who have a design eye, background, or experience.

I really find it strange though. How does an AI know what "AI slop" is? Is it reasonable to tell a child not to do "wrong" if you haven't told them what things are wrong?

one moment it's superintelligence and one moment it's a child?

First thing it did when I tried it, was roaming through files in directories way outside of the project. I tried to get it to explain why it did it multiple times, but I never got anything resembling an explanation.

All that keeps jumping out at me is how they've set it to refuse giving users thinking tokens and prompts for full reasoning in output. Just drives me further away; I may not stop using Claude completely for now, but I'll be moving even more of my primary workload to Chinese providers. That's where openness and freedom is now at.

Ironic, especially given 100 hundred years of Hollywood proaganda telling the west that the US are the center of freedom.

Which was and is true to some extent.

And don't get me wrong, China is a dictatorship, and a tyranny for some.

But then again, the west is a tyranny for some.

That's how the cycles happen. China realizes they could use a little more freedom and US realizes that they could do with a little less. The emerging/shrinking middle class of both countries also moves the sweet spot.

What Chinese models/providers are you using for this? I'm hitting Claude's weekly limits much sooner than I used to with roughly the same workload, so I'm interested in trying alternatives, especially ones with strong coding/agentic performance.

Get yourself an OpenCode Go subscription and give DeepSeek Flash 4.1 a shot.

A common tactic is to used a big brain model like Opus for planning and reviewing, and a cheaper model for execution.

What Chinese provider would you use that is on par with Claude code?

Fourth, if long tool-calling turns still go quiet for longer than you want, have your harness ask for an update

I'm not sure I understand this complexity. In all harnesses I've ever used, tool calls themselves are surfaced to the user as an indication of progress. When the UI/UX around this is engineered well, the user should be able to infer roughly what is going on. Different tools have different ideal presentations. You can't reduce everything to plaintext blobs.

If I absolutely needed intra-turn progress updates, I'd accumulate a separate per-turn transcript and feed it into a cheaper model at deterministic intervals.

Idea: Someone should just build a prompt generator that takes whatever the latest "Prompting" techniques are for each model and re-configure it to be as optimal as possible, adding in whatever is needed to get the highest quality result.

I say the above because I'm seeing entire worlds and games being one-shotted built on X and I just have no idea how they do it. I tried building a large prompt for Fable when it was first released and it didn't have anything close to resembling some of the stuff I'm seeing today.

What bothers me most with Opus 5.5 is its verbosity.

Claude Code has an output style setting that I set to "Concise", with no apparent effect.

I am told this is merely something in the system prompt that the model tends not to pay attention to with large contexts.

Opus 5.5 writes whole essays at the end of the turn, with the important actionable steps somewhere at the bottom.

When prompted to give a concise summary, it usually overshoots into a super short summary and then you have to dig into the details again anyway.

In general I find Opus 5.5's writing to still have more "ticks" or "Claudisms" than the OpenAI models.

Its explanations often appear overcomplicated for simple concepts.

Sure, it's leagues above the ridiculous writing of Opus 5, but Anthropic still has a long way to go here.

ask claude code to start new claude sessions while refining the output style. until it looks right. my claude code now writes well.

Interesting.

I guess I could take some lengthy example explanation, and have it try various instructions and test what results in output that I find preferable.

Maybe I'll give that a try, thanks!

This comment reminds me that one of the features of technological revolutions is just the sheer number of people who are on the bleeding edge of use.

With accumulated "writing style" memories after 5.0 the new 5.5 seem to be quite great, it is concise enough. But I am bothered by another thing, 5.5 seem to be over-eager and agreeable, when I ask stuff like "why is that like this?" it just goes and applies tons of edits instead of clarifying what I mean or what I want or push back. And similarly it changes stuff and then asks if that is how I wanted to be, ignoring three memories that tell it to ask first.

That "mark pasted text" thing is interesting: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt...

  Summarize the main complaints in this thread.
  
  <pasted_content id="ab12">
  ...text the user pasted...
  </pasted_content id="ab12">

Where those IDs are randomly generated and unknown to the user, and the model is told to use that markup to help avoid it suffering prompt injection attacks.

In the past I've been very skeptical of this kind of protection. Anthropic have clearly trained their models for this though, so maybe Opus 5.5 is smart enough for this to work?

Will be interesting to see if minds more devious than mine can break it.

Got to love the pseudo markup slop! An id attribute on an XML closing tag?!? Complete nonsense. Working nonsens, of course, but still nonsense.

This is a failure of the AI foundries; if we have to use totally different prompting techniques for every model, this wont work.

AI is rapidly saturating it's ability to be useful and these products need to start to mature.

It's not 'fun' to manage 50 different broken MCPs and their variety of ways in which they are broken.

It was 'fun' at the start, now it's just 'broken technology'.

Astra and Opus 5.5 are the 'starting point' for the next era of AI where we expect robust tooling.

One of my key complaints with Opus 5.5 so far has been that sometimes it'll execute long-running commands in a way that is blocking any further input or it starts doing stuff without providing much visibility. I've tried giving it instructions to stop doing that but it keeps falling into the same trap.

I feel like hybrid AI-driver UIs are a bit underexplored and are probably a good way to increase visibility. Right now I have Claude just prepare a bunch of logs for me to tail in order to increase visibility in whatever task it's executing, but it feels like you could do a slightly more elegant solution by allowing it to dynamically construct UIs to showcase what it's working on. Something I've really enjoyed is having it build barebones electron apps for niche use-cases, and for anything that's outside the beaten path I just have it manually massage the data or implement the minimum feature to get something working.

Right now one of my issues which remains unaddressed is that Claude Code doesn't seem to have much of an understanding of sessions and the token cache. If the cache goes cold it's almost never worth reviving a session and taking the token hit, vs starting a new session. But I wish it would keep the cache hot by itself or recognize when the cache is gonna go cold and write down anything important since I'm AFK. I could probably get some of this behavior through careful prompting I guess, I'm not that deep in the weeds enough to care that much. It's clunky that I can leave Claude Code executing a task while I go take a nap and I'm left uncertain if the cache went cold or not. I'd really like a gated "Are you sure?" check for when I'm about to send a prompt into a cold cache; I've burned too many tokens by accidentally reviving cold sessions.