Anthropic and OpenAI both dropped new models, and the interesting part isn’t just that they’re better — they’re getting a lot cheaper too. Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 is aimed heavily at coding, enterprise work, finance and other complex agentic tasks.Anthropic says it beats GPT-6 Astra on some coding benchmarks and follows instructions more reliably. It’s also cheaper than the previous Opus generation at $4/M input tokens and $20/M output.

OpenAI launched GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna, using similar training techniques to GPT-6 Astra. Sol costs $2/M input and $10/M output, while Luna is dramatically cheaper at $0.10/$0.50. OpenAI says Sol produces about half as many factual errors as its predecessor. It also claims coding performance around Claude Fable 5.1 levels while costing less.

Feels like the next big AI race is going to be who can deliver near-frontier intelligence at commodity prices.

I work in england.. trying to work out belfast job scene… what’s jt like?

do BT still pay devs under 30 gran?

if anyone has insights into the local market even just broad salary ranges cheers

How long do people think until AI can do most coding related jobs and therefore there would be a need for fewer developers? Or eventually like one per team

Hit us up with MCP servers you have found incredibly useful. What has made your day to day life either in work (booooo) or outside of it a bit eaiser?

Or if you have a proposal for one that you want to build that could be useful or just for fun, let us know.

First off, it's a bad time to be someone who was in love with the art of coding though, I do understand and sympathise with that.

Butttt.... I write zero code by hand anymore, and I absolutely love it. I feel like AI has freed me of shackles that were reducing how long it took me to create things.

I ship 100s of PRs a month now, not just features but fixing tech debt, improving our internal processes, upgrading our “software factory” ( I do fucking hate that term though). QA’ing parts of our product with computer / browser use more effectively and quickly than I ever could have done manually. I’m also freed to think deeply about our direction as a startup and our architecture and experiment with things that I would previously never have got the opportunity to do.

Then I get to delve much deeper into evals / llm obs etc as that's such an important part of our core stack. I can kick off experiments over night and come back to the results in the morning.

Anyone else feel the same?

Bit of a long read but very informative and has some good tips.

Good read.

In my company there is an expectation and pressure that you'll use it. If a team's usage is low the manager is scrutinised. However they haven't gone full "no-one is allowed to manually code anymore".

“Actonomy is an AI product business focused on solving the last mile to production AI.”

Interesting new approach to AI?

"Models have been superhuman at chat for years, so where is all the automation?

This has been my driving question for the last four years. At OpenAI, I helped build the methods that made language models useful at following instructions and talking with people. That work ended up as the research behind ChatGPT.  At the time, I thought maybe chat models would lead to AGI, but despite the hype it became obvious to me that there was something really big missing.

After two years in stealth, countless technical challenges, and research breakthroughs… I am beyond excited to announce that today, TypeSafe AI is releasing our first System One Model: a new class of frontier models built to make fast, structured decisions that software can use directly.

We built a new stack entirely focused on automation: with a new model architecture, parallel sampler for maximum efficiency, and training method we call Reinforcement Learning for Calibrated Decisions (RLCD).

Our first public model is Jev, available today in early access. Jev achieves similar levels of intelligence on System One tasks compared to existing LLMs, while being two orders of magnitude faster and more efficient. While Jev gives up string generation, it’s optimized for structured outputs and can’t hallucinate. 

Think of Jev as a frontier-intelligence function call: unstructured state in, typed probabilistic decisions out. 

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence so see below for the receipts. 💅"

We are working on a community driven Translink Bus tracker focused on Northern Ireland.

The main goal is to build a frontend and backend system for:

- Bus routes and stops

- Journey Tracking

- More accurate arrival predictions

- Compare official/gathered data

Long term, the project is designed to integrate with official data sources (e.g. Translink APIs**)**, with optional GPS/community data to improve accuracy.

This isn’t a tutorial. it’s a real project, already in progress, and we’re looking to bring a few more developers into it.

We’re especially interested in people who:

- Are comfortable reading and contributing to an existing codebase

- Have experience with backend (Python/FastAPI, Java, Maven and Spring Boot.)

- Care about clean architecture, performance, and maintainability

- Want to build something genuinely useful for NI

Current stack:

- FastAPI (Python)

- SQLAlchemy

- Java/Maven/SpringBoot

- PostgreSQL

- Service-based backend architecture

- Frontend in progress (modern / Uber-style UI)

If you’re interested give me a DM and we can talk more. We have GitHub and project specs sorted. We just need the right team. Any questions ask away!

What HLAs are available in NI nowadays?

I'm in Y14 and need to start and watch for applications opening in the next few months.

I struggle to find up to date info on employers websites.

I know of Kainos EAYL but is there anything for Cititech, Allstate, BT, Liberty etc?

Thanks.

Has anyone else experienced many issues with ordering pc parts to Ni?

I’m trying to order some hard drives from seagate and the order keeps getting cancelled.

I have also noticed it a lot on Amazon like we can’t even order a portable power bank and other things

Are there no game developers hiring in this country?

Graduated with a cs degree last year and been job seeking for the past 3 months to no avail in the game dev field.

I may try and get into a different field. Anything that you would recommend for someone who recently pursued gamedev?

What do we all think about the news around AI over the last few months. Especially in the last week were people working in the sector have said there’s a 10% of our annihilation in the next ten years.

Is it something we genuinely need to worry about?

Hi all, getting ready to enter my second year at uni , feeling a bit nervous about applying for placements but a bit excited too.

The university has warned us only around 24% of students last year secured a placement and that its extremely competitve so not feeling confident i will get one, but have been giving it my all.

I have a few personal projects with one bigger one I'm particularly proud of, been attending tech events and giving Networking me best shot ( I'm autistic so not the best at mingling in large groups but have certainly been giving it my best shot). Been doing Leetcode though I understand it's less common over here. I also got onto a couple of insights programes but didn't secure the internships.

I was curious if any of you have been those involved in the interviewing/hiring of placement students have you noticed any trends that might be impacting the hiring rate? Is it just a numbers game ( more students than there are placements) or are students missing out key skills companies are looking for?

Their customer service is genuinely the worst I have experienced.

I ordered 5 12TB drives. Waited 5 days then they cancelled the order. I reached out to them and it took them a week and basically said try order it again (they were sold out of 12tb) so i bit the bullet and ordered 5 16tb drives.

Another 5 days pass the order gets cancelled again.

I reached out to support again and say is there an issue with me being in Northern Ireland rather than mainland UK is that the issue?

They say they are looking into it. They reply every 2 days saying the same thing that they are looking into it.

8 weeks later after escalating and many internal reviews they say it is because I’m in Northern Ireland and not mainland uk.

8 weeks, 2 cancellations just to come to the idea that I first proposed.

Asked if I can order them to a place in England and ship them myself and if they could provide any compensation for the time and effort spent on this and they in lack of a better terms said no basically to the compensation.

They are now out of 12tb and 16tb and only have 20tb left.

Additionally, I used the 10 percent sign up discount code on the previous order so now it is gone and can’t use it.

They even just said for me to try shop elsewhere.

Horrible experience and horrible customer service.

Having graduated last year with a first class honours in computer science (and with a years placement at a pretty big company), I now find myself 6 months into a job at another company, still doing software engineering, however, I am not sure how good my wage is at £27k per annum.

If you were in my shoes would you be looking for a better paid role or take the experience?

I’m currently leaning more towards staying to get up my experience but if the salary I am getting is really as low as I think it is then I would consider going to interview somewhere.

It’s Sunday night. I’m sure for a lot of people the dread has kicked in for returning to work.

If you could do it all again and change your career or were financially stable enough to get out of IT now, what would you do?

How's it going folks?

Just wanted to say a quick hello, great to see this sub active as I had previously not known about it.

Currently enrolled in a computing foundation degree, final year starts Monday so I may come seeking advice.

Belfast seems to be getting a lot of attention about its growing tech sector, startups and all these exciting companies setting up here.
But anytime I speak to a recruiter about looking for a new role, they just seem to push TP ICAP. Once I tell them I’m not interested, I never hear from them again.
Surely there’s smaller companies or startups around Belfast and NI looking for software engineers?
Where’s everyone finding these jobs? Recruiters and the usual job boards seem pretty useless unless you want to work for one of the big companies.
Just wondering how everyone else is finding the job market at the minute?