Niko E.

@lauriewired Agents can replace or extend your thinking.

I’m convinced that a large % of programmers don’t actually like computers. As a side effect, are also perfectly happy to throw away their reasoning to a model as soon as they can. I don’t get it, at ALL. Don’t you *LIKE* understanding the magic of the machine? You do realize hand-programming (I hate that I even have to specify hand now) is fun…right?

@badlogicgames This has been working great for me. I have a bunch of files explaining a few specific topics and the rest is just in the codebase. The agents gave been great at navigating and understanding it. Especially gpt 5.5 and 5.6 just gets it.

i get asked what memory system i use often. my answer has always been: my codebase is my memory system.

@housecor Yes. But there mission would be to ensure a great user experience, not manually test each two line change.

If you were running your own software dev shop, would you hire dedicated QA?

@marty_kausas @opencode is great and supports every model under the sun, but for anthropic subscription your out of luck with third party harnesses

i'm so sick of using claude code in a terminal i'm not coding. who has made a great app that i can use with any model?

@dexhorthy When do you go for no sub agents?

i know i've been griping about a couple SOL things but overall the GPT 5.6 models are *incredible* - here's my highlights Sol - doesn't talk like a robot anymore - super well done and impressive. not quite fable-level but soooo much better than 5.5 Terra - truly a sonnet-class model, great for research subagents, and really strong for general knowledge work - nice! Sol - still not great at UI - much better, but not reaching the opus-level of "yolo in a prompt and get something beautiful without even trying" The other thing to watch out for - these models LOVE subagents and skills - very well tuned to use them, which means we had to refine a lot of things in our general workflow 1) many skills and prompts steered pretty hard to subagents "use them", "use them in parallel", etc - this is no longer necessary 2) many skills advertised hard in description field - "pick me", "you MUST use this skill whenever ..." - that is complete overkill now 3) in fact we're disabling model invocation on a bunch of skills cause I had never need a model reach for them before and now its regularly invoking skills/commands I forgot even existed 4) i had built an intuition around typing "use a subagent"-ish things when prompting. no longer necessary. instead i am building intuition around "no subagents" and i send this probably 1 in 4 prompts to Sol all around great release - reminder that ever new generation of models means you should review and potential throw out a bunch of your skills/prompts/instructions that are no longer necessary more updates as we go, what did I miss?

@elvissun I go with Sol low for now. Terra is supposed to be gpt 5.5 equivalent but cheaper.

ok can someone tell me the equivalent of gpt5.5 xhigh in gpt5.6? is it sol medium or terra xhigh?

@DanielLockyer With GPT low is my go-to

I have no idea which effort level to choose for models these days low/medium/high/xhigh/ultra/max?? anyone else?

@simonw They are just trying to find product-market-fit and they are experimenting with the packaging. All variations on a theme.

I am *so confused* by ChatGPT v. ChatGPT Codex v. ChatGPT Work v. Claude v. Claude Code v. Claude Cowork right now!

@simonw Do you provide the issues as context?

Sometimes they DO attempt to do that but guess the rationale incorrectly, which is worse than not adding no a rationale at all I do try to link commits back to issues though, which are written by me and provide a much better answer to the reason behind a change

I've been letting Claude and GLT-5.5 write almost all of my commit messages recently, but I don't feel great about it "omitting the higher-level framing needed to understand broadly what the code is doing" is definitely the key problem there

@housecor The unnecessary verbosity is mostly Opus and missing instructions.

I keep seeing AI misuse. Tickets generated by AI that are verbose and hard to understand. Instructions files generated by AI that are full of needless bloat. Tests generated by AI that mock so much that they’re near worthless.

@thdxr Hard question. Many things get developed because it's hard to solve the same problem over and over again. But the value of hard has changed with LLMs. So I'd expect the complexity required to justify building and maintaining a package would have gone up

imagine if LLMs were invented any any previous point - say 20 years ago when a bunch of tools it loves to use didn't even exist do you think it would have accelerated them existing? or would it have calcified things

@zriael @karthikb351 Yes

@nefthy @karthikb351 Probabilistic implementation. Deterministic validation. And the fact that the vast majority of “coding” use-cases are well within distribution.

Struggling with how to reconcile: a. Many smart and insightful people I've known/followed for years in tech now fully in the "coding is largely solved" camp b. What I can see with my own eyes This feels like some kind of psychosis and I don't know if _I'm_ the one having it

@zeeg @simonw @RhysSullivan @dexhorthy TDD is IMO the only way to make models to produce decent tests

idk about you but no model has written any form of good tests for me "watch how many unit tests i can write that are absolutely of zero value" the llms basically substitute "does the code run at all" for unit tests, and they - without insane steering - in my experience will not generate any reasonable test that survives changes whatsoever

@simonw @RhysSullivan @zeeg @dexhorthy I had the situation the other day, where I asked it to add some integration tests and to flag failing tests so we can discuss if the test fails or the code is broken. It flagged 5 cases, the first two disappeared in a puff of smoke, when I asked it to explain them...

@RhysSullivan @zeeg @dexhorthy How come it's not catching those mistakes with tests?

i think where i'm landing is that the code doesn't matter, but the types do

@RhysSullivan @dexhorthy Look at Claude Code. It's buggy with bad ux. That pretty much tells you what you get from fully agentic workflows today

@dexhorthy it's crazy watching fable code because it just makes so many mistakes that are going to be landmines in a few months i truly do not understand how the claude code team / others say they've got so agentic on their programming

@Star_Knight12 Depends on the situation

do you still read the code AI writes for you or do you just hit accept and pray

@phuctm97 Opus still needs it.. it often just goes ahead to fix stuff

Remember plan mode? It’s ancient tech now. You’re an uncle/aunty if you’re still using it. 🧓

@haider1 GPT 5.5 low is where my heart lies at the moment. Can't imagine what I'd need pro for.

openai missed a trick by keeping gpt-5.5 pro out of codex with codex having much higher usage limits and openai giving out so many resets, there is basically no reason to pay for the claude max 20x plan right now now i really hope they add gpt-5.6 "pro or sol ultra" to codex

@thsottiaux @l_hey_l @hqmank Yes

@l_hey_l @hqmank Did you think we would stop training models after Sol?

✅Found a wild token hack that only works properly on Fable 5. Claude charges image tokens by pixel size, not by how much text is in the image. So someone built a proxy that renders your context into PNGs before sending it to the API. Before: 92,000 tokens for a dense tool result After: 4,761 tokens for the same content as a PNG End-to-end bill savings: 59-70%. SWE-bench tasks: same completion rate, half the cost. Link in reply👇