Has anyone been using Claude Opus 4.5? I’d recommend it strongly especially if you are interested in getting more into programming. I’ve used it to create instrument interfaces in Python entirely from uploading the pdf manual with almost no further modification. Other things I’ve used it for:
Creating a PLR resource definition from a screenshot of a plate schematic
Creating terminal UI applications with built-in unit test suites and calibration tools for my lab’s automated platforms
Practically any application you can think of can be created pretty quickly with Opus 4.5. It also has its own internal environment for testing code so its outputs are a lot more reliable than has previously been the case with LLMs.
For the Bay Area Lab Automators hackathons the point is to leverage AI x Lab Automation to ship something. Ergo we do not only encourage the use of AI tools to move from 0 to 1, we also have workshops where we teach folks to build their own tools or agents with AI.
We have founders, PM’s, national lab scientists who have never programmed a liquid handler and even the most seasoned AI x Bio startup engineers come through and just experiment with AI x robots.
It’s honestly incredible what folks can build in a few hours. With 24 hours, they’re building entire product suites.