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2025: The Year in LLMs

simonwillison.net

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Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#41

Post by walt_grata »

simonw wrote: post #36
skydhash wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please tell me which one of the headings is not about increased usage o LLMs and derived tools and is about some improvement in the axes of reliability or or any kind of usefulness. Here is the changelog for OpenBSD 7.8: https://www.openbsd.org/78.html There's nothing here that says: We make it easier to use it more of it. It's about using it better and fixing underlying problems.

The coding agent heading. Claude Code and tools like it represent a huge improvement in what you can usefully get done with LLMs. Mistakes and hallucinations matter a whole lot less if a reasoning LLM can try the code, see that it doesn't work and fix the problem.

If it actually does that without an argument. I can't believe I have to say that about a computer program

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#42

Post by skydhash »

simonw wrote: post #36
skydhash wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please tell me which one of the headings is not about increased usage o LLMs and derived tools and is about some improvement in the axes of reliability or or any kind of usefulness. Here is the changelog for OpenBSD 7.8: https://www.openbsd.org/78.html There's nothing here that says: We make it easier to use it more of it. It's about using it better and fixing underlying problems.

The coding agent heading. Claude Code and tools like it represent a huge improvement in what you can usefully get done with LLMs. Mistakes and hallucinations matter a whole lot less if a reasoning LLM can try the code, see that it doesn't work and fix the problem.

> The coding agent heading. Claude Code and tools like it represent a huge improvement in what you can usefully get done with LLMs.

Does it? It's all prompt manipulation. Shell script are powerful yes, but not really huge improvement over having a shell (REPL interface) to the system. And even then a lot of programs just use syscalls or wrapper libraries.

> can try the code, see that it doesn't work and fix the problem.

Can you really say that does happens reliably?

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#43

Post by walt_grata »

simonw wrote: post #33
sho_hn wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure -- but that's fair game in engineering. I work on cars. If we kill people with safety faults I expect it to make more headlines than all the fun roadtrips. What I find interesting with chat bots is that they're "web apps" so to speak, but with safety engineering aspects that type of developer is typically not exposed to or familiar with.

One of the tough problems here is privacy. AI labs really don't want to be in the habit of actively monitoring people's conversations with their bots, but they also need to prevent bad situations from arising and getting worse.

Until AI labs have the equivalent of an SLA for giving accurate and helpful responses it don't get better. They've not even able to measure if the agents work correctly and consistently.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#44

Post by kakapo5672 »

skydhash wrote: post #21
MattRix wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Why do people assume negative critique is ignorance?

Whenever someone tells me that AI is worthless, does nothing, scam/slop etc, I ask them about their own AI usage, and their general knowledge about what's going on.

Invariably they've never used AI, or at most very rarely. (If they used AI beyond that, this would be admission that it was useful at some level).

Therefore it's reasonable to assume that you are in that boat. Now that might not be true in your case, who knows, but it's definitely true on average.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#45

Post by noodletheworld »

skydhash wrote: post #34
dmd wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People denied that bicycles could possibly balance even as others happily pedaled by. This is the same thing.

Please tell me which one of the headings is not about increased usage o LLMs and derived tools and is about some improvement in the axes of reliability or or any kind of usefulness. Here is the changelog for OpenBSD 7.8: https://www.openbsd.org/78.html There's nothing here that says: We make it easier to use it more of it. It's about using it better and fixing underlying problems.

I know it seems like forever ago, but claude code only came out in 2025.

Its very difficult to argue the point that claude code:

1) was a paradigm shift in terms of functionality, despite, to be fair, at best, incremental improvements in the underlying models.

2) The results are an order of magnitude, I estimate, better in terms of output.

I think its very fair to distill “AI progress 2025” to: you can get better results (up to a point; better than raw output anyway; scaling to multiple agents has not worked) without better models with clever tools and loops. (…and video/image slop infests everything :p).

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#46

Post by quaintpartridge »

OGEnthusiast wrote: post #15
throwup238 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they voted to add some syntactic sugar to Java... I remember when we just wanted to rewrite everything in Rust. Those were the simpler times, when crypto bros seemed like the worst venture capitalism could conjure.

Crypto bros in hindsight were so much less dangerous than AI bros. At least they weren't trying to construct data centers in rural America or prop up artificial stocks like $NVDA.

They were, just not as many. https://www.wired.com/story/the-worlds-biggest-bitcoin-mine-...

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#47

Post by senordevnyc »

skydhash wrote: post #11

[flagged]

This comment is legitimately hilarious to me. I thought it was satire at first. The list of what has happened in this field in the last twelve months is staggering to me, while you write it off as essentially nothing.

Different strokes, but I’m getting so much more done and mostly enjoying it. Can’t wait to see what 2026 holds!

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#48

Post by simonw »

skydhash wrote: post #42
simonw wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The coding agent heading. Claude Code and tools like it represent a huge improvement in what you can usefully get done with LLMs. Mistakes and hallucinations matter a whole lot less if a reasoning LLM can try the code, see that it doesn't work and fix the problem.

> The coding agent heading. Claude Code and tools like it represent a huge improvement in what you can usefully get done with LLMs. Does it? It's all prompt manipulation. Shell script are powerful yes, but not really huge improvement over having a shell (REPL interface) to the system. And even then a lot of programs just use syscalls or wrapper libraries. > can try the code, see that it doesn't work and fix the probl…

Depends on what you mean by "reliably".

If you mean 100% correct all of the time then no.

If you mean correct often enough that you can expect it to be a productive assistant that helps solve all sorts of problems faster than you could solve them without it, and which makes mistakes infrequently enough that you waste less time fixing them than you would doing everything by yourself then yes, it's plenty reliable enough now.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#49

Post by Alex-Programs »

simonw wrote: post #7
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #6

> The (only?) year of MCP I like to believe, but MCP is quickly turning into an enterprise thing so I think it will stick around for good.

I think it will stick around, but I don't think it will have another year where it's the hot thing it was back in January through May.

I never quite got what was so "hot" about it. There seems to be an entire parallel ecosystem of corporates that are just begging to turn AI into PowerPoint slides so that they can mould it into a shape that's familiar.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#50

Post by n2d4 »

skydhash wrote: post #11

[flagged]

This is extremely dismissive. Claude Code helps me make a majority of changes to our codebase now, particularly small ones, and is an insane efficiency boost. You may not have the same experience for one reason or another, but plenty of devs do, so "nothing happened" is absolutely wrong.

2024 was a lot of talk, a lot of "AI could hypothetically do this and that". 2025 was the year where it genuinely started to enter people's workflows. Not everything we've been told would happen has happened (I still make my own presentations and write my own emails) but coding agents certainly have!

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