I don’t know what’s wrong with Opus 5. I’ve been using Code since November 2025 and Opus 5 is the first blatant regression I’ve seen. Like you said, it just goes off into an endless loop doing random busy-work type of stuff. That’s the best way I can describe it. It’s doing stuff, but it seems mostly like busy-work to me. I’m not saying the model is “dumb” it’s most certainly capable, its vision is better than 4.8 but however they post-trained it is a fuckup.
Also whole heartedly agree with the Opus 5 output being incomprehensible. It’s written in a way that I’d call spaghetti-tech-English. You can unravel it but it’s painful. Fables explanations is effortless and smooth. Opus 5 is user hostile.
Are you familiar with the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae? It's a project that may meet your needs. Paywalled, unfortunately, but I assume it would be a one-time expense.
Two thoughts on someone who went out of their way to learn math:
1. If you can already program, the worst thing you can do is think of mathematics as learning a programming language. It is not, and you will waste your time being frustrated with things like syntax and notation. You get “used to” mathematics by doing it, and it’s something on its own. Just go with it. It’s ok to be confused.
2. Do the exercises, and stop asking for “solution manuals”, the point is to get you thinking and the struggle is most important part, not whether you got it “right”. Again, I think this is a programmer centric way of looking at things: “how do I know it’s
right if I can’t compile it”.
Maybe that’s why programmers like the foundations of mathematics. Like if somehow they could just go to the bottom of things, the assembler/machine code of sorts, the whole enterprise would make sense. Counterintuitively, the really great mathematicians of yore, did mathematics before it was anywhere close to formalized.
>Again, I think this is a programmer centric way of looking at things: “how do I know it’s right if I can’t compile it”.
I would argue this would only be true for those without formal education. Writing your code on paper is very common in CS courses. You get used to not being able to compile it.
I think your latter comment is kind of analogous to people writing python (or any high-level language) without understanding assembly. I think maybe that reduces the mystery a bit?
I regularly do a “go to DynaTrace, look at how this service gets used in production then use a profiler and see if there’s any low hanging optimisations we could make” on stuff. LLMs are really good at doing everything that was fun about software development.
Ha, I have a whole hobby work-stream going on about finding low-hanging fruit in various open source projects to turn into valuable contributions.
Two premier sources: (1) look at good contributions someone already tried to make, but that got stuck in review or were otherwise abandoned. (2) look at user reported bugs and see if we can find a user reported bugs, and see if we can reproduce and fix cheaply.
Both are explicitly scoped as best-effort affairs: move on, if you can't quickly make progress.
Most of the work I have to do as a human is review and navigating the submission process: tokens are cheap these days, so you really need to make sure the contribution is actually worth someone's time to review.
It’s great to care about the craft as long as someone else is paying for it. I think most software developers are waking up to the reality that they were always just holding business at ransom with their craft. Software is a grudge purchase for businesses. No one has ever cared about the craft except the craftsmen.
The parent comment’s take resonates with me and your response is exactly, what I assume, frustrates us both.
I’ve been at companies that were founded on sales of physical goods that literally had vendors pick them for vended goods because they found the software made purchasing more convenient - as in they literally had customers tell them they bought their physical goods because of their software. They didn’t need the software. The software wasn’t critical to acquiring goods. They could have purchased goods elsewhere of similar quality and often potentially lower cost. The customers cared about the software, the software (that was not part of their core business) drove the core business.
Edit: I originally had a lot more typed about how craft matters and not being strictly about perfection. It wasn’t necessary to drive the point, so I removed it. People do buy craft and many pay a hefty premium for better craft (in all aspects, both producer COGS and customer needs/desires).
Look I get it. I completely emphasise with the feeling. My undergrad is Computer Science, I often dreamed about writing my own compiler and spent years learning low level performance optimization, loved design patterns, re-factoring code to be more elegant, all that stuff.
I just feel like after years in industry and how I’m steering something like Fable now that all of this is irrelevant and the writing is crystal clear on the wall: Writing software by hand is in its death throes. There is no future for it besides some very niche areas. When last have you actually looked at what your high level language is actually being compiled and optimised to? We’re moving up the abstraction ladder with software.
To your point: People care about the actual output, the interface, whether it does what they want it to do, but in no way do they care about the internals and how it’s built. That’s an implementation detail. And that’s where all the fun of the craft actually sits.
This is not unique to software engineering though, go take a look at the maths and mathematics subreddits. There are guys doing PhDs in maths who are too afraid to run their dissertation topics through the latest models because it might just solve the problem they’ve spent the last few years working on in a few hours. They absolutely hate that problems are being blown away where people have spent years trying to figure out. It feels like the same psychological pain software engineers are going through.
I don't think you do get it. Caring about craft and wanting to write things like compilers are two very distinct things.
One is liking a mental challenge - like a crossword puzzle. The other is having pride in the quality of your work.
An LLM is not a compiler. It is the leakiest abstraction of all time. I never experienced a compiler making a mistake, I think, ever. Every LLM I use makes a critical mistake somewhere between 50% and 95% of the time.
If vibe coding truly is the future of coding then it really doesn't matter what you do. Keep up or don't keep up it doesn't matter. Your career is dead either way because your boss will replace you with a prompt. Might as well give up now.
The trajectory is that the LLM providers have been making prompting increasingly dead-simple for the past 2 years. Any edge a group of individuals may have in knowing how to use LLMs gets absorbed into the LLM product.
I feel like that applies to all labor. labor is just business at ransom with productivity that they themselves cannot (or do not want) to do. If they could automate out humanity tomorrow, they would.
In comes the snake oil salesmen telling them they can finally do this. Of course they will fall for the notion, even if they know it's not true. It's what they want oh so badly to be true.
The patient with heart disease doesnt give a shit about exercising and eating healthy they just want the doctor to make them better.
No business has ever appreciated my craft directly and why would they? Theyve just enjoyed the indirect benefits - speedy delivery of bug free features. Sometimes execs understood why they got that from one team and not another, mostly they didn't.
The difference these days is not that high quality code isnt appreciated it's just that there is a religion that has developed around AI being The One True Way To Develop.
When it is delivering worse quality work, more slowly that is usually tolerated because the hope is that it will long term lead to the ability to lay off engineers.
You are correct on all counts. This is the IKEA phase of software development. Disposable shit. Need something new and ask an LLM to summon it into existence. I guess you could compare it to this hand-crafted desk I’m sitting at that my great grandfather built himself. He was a carpenter. It’s still here, decades later. To be honest, my next desk would be some IKEA shit, because it’s cheap and I can replace it every few years as fashion changes. But I get the emotional attachment.
The economics of code and carpentry are different though. A really good piece of code to, say, calculate taxes can be written once and used by a million people.
Or, a million people might generate a one off piece of slop to calculate their taxes.
Which one was more efficient?
I do think that disposable easy to validate software will probably never be human written again but I also think that the demand for this type of software is wildly overestimated. Users mostly don't want a bespoke weather app that is customized to their prompt they want one which they can trust.
Interesting project. I would love if you could switch fonts to something like New Athena Unicode.
I built something similar to this by cloning the Diogenes repo and getting Claude to re-implement it in Python (it’s a very old battle tested Perl code base, so a great reference implementation) and using the TLG database for the Greek and Latin texts. You can take this even further by integrating it with the Barrington Atlas (there are scans on Anna’s Archive) for looking up ancient place names, so you have dictionary + map lookups. If you’ve read any of the Landmark series books you’d known what I mean.
Also better if you can generate chapter by chapter critical apparatus on difficult grammar and Anki decks. It’s an annoying part of learning these languages to have to stop and look up words, I like spending a few days learning vocab before reading and it makes it so much more pleasant than having to stop and look things up the whole time.
Obviously all this stuff is copyright so it can never be shared, but I don’t care it’s for my own personal use. I also bought like 6 hours worth of Ionnis Strattakis’ recordings where he reads a bunch of Ancient Greek in reconstructed Attic pronunciation and fine-tuned a text to speech model (styletts2) with full accent markings and breathings. It’s extremely natural sounding. My long term goal is to have a personal tutor that I can speak Attic to and basically have lessons with everyday (speech to text -> llm-> text to speech). All the pieces are there to actually do this.
LLMs have been an absolute game changer for me who is a hobby classicist but also knows how to build software. They are so amazingly good at Attic Greek and Latin, it’s like having the best teachers in the word at your fingertips for some really niche topics that it wouldn’t be possible with otherwise. Also extremely good at managing, building, cleaning up, deduplicating Anki decks.
> LLMs have been an absolute game changer for me who is a hobby classicist but also knows how to build software.
Definitely! I myself have been having a lot of fun[0] recently using LLMs to enrich one of my favorite beginner Latin readers[1] with audio forced-alignment, POS tagging, morphology, definitions, and other niceties that learners might appreciate.
Nice! I love all the Latin audio, although most of it is well above my level. I'm always pleased to hear well-pronounced Latin with elision and prodelision. Do you know how the audio is licensed? I'd love to have my own copy, and am trying to organize a CC-BY-SA archive of spoken word Latin.
You could ask the author "wardfarnsworth at gmail.com". I have been in touch with him before about his chess website https://www.chesstactics.org based on his book "Predator at the Chess board". He was quite responsive.
Kinda font-related, it's throwing me off how every V in the Latin texts show as U. I don't like how they modernized the spellings in school, but if you're not doing that, aren't they all V?
Also most of the word popups use different spellings, like "iam" becomes "jam".
Using either spaces or miniscule letters, is anachronistic for both classical Latin and Greek. They only had a single case in antiquity and didn't usually mark word boundaries.
Sort of. Romans didn't handwrite like that. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_cursive . Note that the "u" character in both ancient and late ancient Roman cursive is more like the modern "u".
A web interface to classical texts is going to be anachronistic.
If its purpose is pedagogical, it should include macrons, spaces, punctuation, case -- the works. Making every word clickable but leaving the reader to guess at vowel length seems like leaving the job half done.
I would love to learn more / collab (for personal use) if there's a way to connect with you. I'm on proton mail if you want to reach out, henrystafford77.
I’m going to check that out. My personal favorite is the variant of New Athena Unicode they use in the Cultura Classica books (it’s like Lingua Latina per se Illustrata but for Attic). They made some modifications on some of the characters, noticeably sigma. I might get Claude to clone that font for me so I can use it in my projects.
I don’t trust point estimates like 14%. It’s like calculating an average salary and saying it’s $120k. Completely meaningless. What does the actual distribution look like that this was pulled from? No standard deviation. Is it even symmetric? What’s the 10th and 90th percentiles? Just giving a statistic on its own tells me nothing.
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