This post was the result of my tryst with Claude Opus 4.6 from the time it was launched, which I consider a watershed moment. This is when coding as we know it has been truly solved – well almost.
Now, don’t get me wrong. ‘AI coding’ was well and truly happening even several months back. But with Opus 4.6, the agentic workflow is so much improved that it can think about the problem much deeper and can work autonomously for much longer (like 30 minutes or more) instead of going wayward or needing user intervention or not able to understand exactly what the user is trying to convey.
I started my M.Tech project with Sonnet 3.5 and believe me there is a day and night difference between that and Opus 4.6 and all in the span of a few months. What used to be an assistant has taken up a more responsible developer role now. Also we have a ‘Plan’ mode now which instead of jumping to code and realising it has to correct something, asks relevant questions to understand your problem better, iterates till it is completely clear and then goes on to ‘Build’ using the agent. There are also sub-agents that can run in parallel on tasks that don’t influence each other. With enough permissions and access to the shell say to install python packages etc, the ‘Build’ Agent then goes about its job and you can take a walk or coffee break to come back and see that is has done days of work in minutes.
How can one not be excited or thrilled by this leap in productivity . So if you always had some idea that you wanted to implement, some hobby project that you did not have time to bring to fruition, now is your time. Get GitHub Copilot for Visual Code or any other alternative option that you specifically like which support Opus 4.6 (or a future version). There is still a need to play the ‘Architect’ role instructing Opus and clarifying contradictions etc at a higher level.
Surprisingly it was a more fulfilling work – I wasn’t missing coding by hand – In fact I did not code a single line for the project. Instead I could get exactly what I wanted, including a lot of variations that I wanted to try, beautiful outputs that could easily be converted to websites, so much so that I have started enjoying this process.
Of course the crash of IT stocks do tell the other side of the story- the disruption that this can likely cause – because remember I said one Architect; so what happens to the junior developers or freshers; only time will tell. My hope is that this ends well for everyone – I can always hope.