this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026
811 points (99.6% liked)
People Twitter
10036 readers
1385 users here now
People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
- Mark NSFW content.
- No doxxing people.
- Must be a pic of the tweet or similar. No direct links to the tweet.
- No bullying or international politcs
- Be excellent to each other.
- Provide an archived link to the tweet (or similar) being shown if it's a major figure or a politician. Archive.is the best way.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Not really...
Yes, it pays attention to certain details that humans will tend to flub, so it's better than juniors when it comes to that...
But broadly speaking, it's a moron. It's like a junior dev pasting 15 year old stack overflow answers into a project, but better at making it fit in, but still doing pretty dumb approaches.
I spent a bunch of tokens to try to get Opus 4.7 to do a task for me last week. The result had mistakes and the test case that should be near instant took 3 minutes to complete (indicating that a user would be staring at a spinner for 3 minutes). It did save me the trouble of trying to figure out the details basic structure of the thing I was going to interact with (the documentation was dense and lacking specific examples, and Opus did output something that let me see how it basically worked in a to-the-point way), but I had to rewrite the "meat" of the task to get correct execution in under a second.
My impression has been less about it being more "senior" over time and more about being able to consistently deliver junior level work for longer amounts of output. Error rate remains problematic so you end up with more to review that in a way tortuously "looks right" for longer. When it digs itself into a hole, it's very bad at trying to amend the mess that has accumulated.
I mean obviously mileage does vary from project to project and task to task, but i think you might be overestimating mid-level developers. Or you've been really lucky with your recruitment ! Cause i would describe them just the way you described Opus. Pretty eager, kind of try-hard, decent engineering chops but often misdirected with dumb approaches.
Of course my experience is limited and i've never really been in a managing role but i've been the adult in a fair number of rooms and i've done my share of "grooming sprints" and dispatching tasks.
That being said, there are projects that are horribly reluctant to agentic coding. It's pretty rare as most codebases nowadays are bog standard and rely on roughly the same abstractions, but i've seen it happen. It can come from the complexity of the domain, or of the codebase, or from the way documentation and tribal knowledge clash, or a myriad other reasons. Often it's the kind of projects that require more mature devs and can't really onboard juniors/mids.
Oh yeah definitely. Once it's in the hole you better scratch that branch off and restart with more specific instructions cause agents are very "additive", they don't often think to remove stuff and change their approach. Again, kind of like mid devs once they're committed to an implementation plan.