[deaux]

> at this time last year I couldn't even get Claude (using Cursor) to spin me up a service skeleton that would compile, let alone do anything meaningful

I've been using it to do this for 2 years now. And many people with me. The change you mention is one of is primarily one of Overton windows, of vibes.

[supern0va]

>I've been using it to do this for 2 years now. And many people with me. The change you mention is one of is primarily one of Overton windows, of vibes.

I suspect this may have depended on the specific framework. I quite literally could not get Claude (in Cursor) to give me a basic Micronaut setup in a fresh workspace with essentially a "hello, world" API. I would guess that if you're using something like Python and FastAPI, it might have been an easier task or better represented in the data.

The difference that I observed in the Opus 4.5 era is that Claude could take a service framework it has never seen before (proprietary corp) and figure it out.

[simonw]

Which harness software were you using for this 2 years ago? VS Code Copilot? Cursor?

[WhatIsDukkha]

Aider for me

Very successful by just being careful and walking it forward.

Yes its about 2 years, August 2024 from git it looks like.

[noufalibrahim]

I've had success with Aider from October of 2025 (from my git logs). I have to differ from the general sentiment over here. The tools and models are good enough to make a change in the way work is done. Of course, Big Tech. will move fast and make mistakes but this is qualitatively different from other recent hypes (e.g. crypto/NFT). It has had genuine impact on people and their lives and a lot of simpler jobs with larger teams have been replaced by these models and one operator.

[deaux]

Exactly the same for me. Sonnet 3.5+Aider made it possible.

I got downvoted though, apparently you and me are liars, haha. Easier to believe that than admit that their take of "I adopted it exactly when it became viable, now it's good, and before that it was a waste of time" was wrong. They're the people who were loudly claiming here last summer it was useless, asking "show me anything useful that has been coded using LLMs". Come to think of it, it has now been a few months since I saw one of those. Used to be every other thread.

[deaux]

Exact same for me as WhatIsDukka.

[square_usual]

Yeah, I strongly remember getting Sonnet 3.5 with Aider to boostrap an (albeit basic) project and getting it to work. Especially vivid because I told my roommate at the time about it and he also tried it out and was also shocked. I'd put maybe $20 in credits into the API haha. Feels so quaint, it's almost a foregone conclusion with the current models and harnesses.