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2025: The Year in LLMs

simonwillison.net

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Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#61

Post by wickedsight »

bandrami wrote: post #55
n2d4 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Did you ship more in 2025 than in 2024?

I definitely did.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#63

Post by simonw »

techpression wrote: post #59

Nothing about the severe impact on the environment, and the hand waviness about water usage hurt to read. The referenced post was missing every single point about the issue by making it global instead of local. And as if data center buildouts are properly planned and dimensioned for existing infrastructure… Add to this that all the hardware is already old and the amount of waste we’re producing right now is mind bogg…

"Nothing about the severe impact on the environment"

I literally said:

"AI data centers continue to burn vast amounts of energy and the arms race to build them continues to accelerate in a way that feels unsustainable."

AND I linked to my coverage from last year, which is still true today (hence why I felt no need to update it): https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31/llms-in-2024/#the-envi...

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#64

Post by skydhash »

bandrami wrote: post #58
noodletheworld wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 res…

Did more software ship in 2025 than in 2024? I'm still looking for some actual indication of output here. I get that people feel more productive but the actual metrics don't seem to agree.

I'm still waiting for the Linux drivers to be written because of all the 20x improvements that AI hypers are touting. I would even settle for Apple M3 and M4 computers to be supported by Asahi.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#65

Post by blibble »

dmd wrote: post #23
skydhash wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people assume negative critique is ignorance?

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

people also said that selling jpegs of monkeys for millions of dollars was a pump and dump scam, and would collapse

they were right

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#66

Post by GCUMstlyHarmls »

bandrami wrote: post #55
n2d4 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Did you ship more in 2025 than in 2024?

Shipping in 2025: https://x.com/trq212/status/2001848726395269619

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#67

Post by didip »

Indeed. I don't understand why Hacker News is so dismissive about the coming of LLMs, maybe HN readers are going through 5 stages of grief?

But LLM is certainly a game changer, I can see it delivering impact bigger than the internet itself. Both require a lot of investments.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#68

Post by dham »

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…

You're welcome to try the LLM's yourself and come up with your own conclusions. By what you've posted it doesn't look like you've tried the anything in the last 2 years. Yes LLM's can be annoying, but there has been progress.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#69

Post by skydhash »

n2d4 wrote: post #50
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…

And this is one of the vague "AI helped me do more".

This is me touting for Emacs

Emacs was a great plus for me over the last year. The integration with various tooling with comint (REPL integration), compile (build or report tools), TUI (through eat or ansi-term), gave me a unified experience through the buffer paradigm of emacs. Using the same set of commands boosted my editing process and the easy addition of new commands make it easy to fit my development workflow to the editor.

This is how easy it is to write a non-vague "tool X helped me" and I'm not even an English native speaker.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#70

Post by cebert »

didip wrote: post #67

Indeed. I don't understand why Hacker News is so dismissive about the coming of LLMs, maybe HN readers are going through 5 stages of grief? But LLM is certainly a game changer, I can see it delivering impact bigger than the internet itself. Both require a lot of investments.

Many people feel threatened by the rapid advancements in LLMs, fearing that their skills may become obsolete, and in turn act irrationally. To navigate this change effectively, we must keep open minds, keep adaptable, and embrace continuous learning.
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