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The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

simonwillison.net

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Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#51

Post by musebox35 »

viccis wrote: post #44
kvakkefly wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember this very clearly myself. Before opus 4.5, I was doing a lot of hand holding and was coding a lot myself, but I have not written code since that day more or less. I did write some stuff myself just to learn how the enigma encryption machine worked, so wrote myself to learn. But professionally, I stopped coding in November.

How do you justify your salary given that you're just using a tool that any of us could use for $20 an hour in your role?

Please see Ben Evans’ podcast on a good take on this. Coding is just one of the task you do in your job, it is not the job or at least it probably is not. You do not get paid to code, you get paid to make a set of decisions that create value to the company. If this is automated then yes sadly your salary is not justified.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#52

Post by ShinyLeftPad »

vishal_new wrote: post #49

what are your thoughts on Software engineer replacement. My team has already seen big reductions. Q/A team is gone. Software Engineer reduced by a third. Scared for the future

If you're famous, you'll be fine. If you're in retiring age, you don't care. Otherwise, good luck! We put ourselves on the street by not protesting what is happening.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#54

Post by [deleted] »

grey-area wrote: post #43

Haven’t noticed much significant progress in LLMs myself in 6 months (significant as in new or vastly improved capabilities or understanding, not new releases, there are plenty of those). I feel like if anything people started to realise the significant limitations of LLMs when you try to use them as ‘agents’ which was the big direction LLM companies tried to push recently. Best use of LLMs so far IMO is finding vuln…

[deleted]

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#56

Post by rafaelmn »

viccis wrote: post #44
kvakkefly wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember this very clearly myself. Before opus 4.5, I was doing a lot of hand holding and was coding a lot myself, but I have not written code since that day more or less. I did write some stuff myself just to learn how the enigma encryption machine worked, so wrote myself to learn. But professionally, I stopped coding in November.

How do you justify your salary given that you're just using a tool that any of us could use for $20 an hour in your role?

How do you justify your salary given that you're just using OSS compiler/editor any of us could use for free in your role ?

AI just changed how I edit code - I still see coworkers (senior developers) failing with Claude/Codex and get stuck when there are trivial solutions if you understand the full problem space. Right now AI is just a productivity tool.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#58

Post by rahimnathwani »

simonw wrote: post #35
DeathArrow wrote: post #28

Apart from GLM 5.1 and Qwen 3.6, there are other Chinese models that are noteworthy: Kimi K2.6, Xiaomi MiMo V2.5 Pro, Deepseek v4 and MiniMax M2.7.

100% true - I only had five minutes so I had to edit it down to just a couple, but all of those models are excellent and keep leap-frogging each other.

Looking forward to next time, hoping you mention speculative decoding and MTP :)

It would support your point about the performance of 20GB local models.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#59

Post by dnnddidiej »

bluegatty wrote: post #19
rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #12

Am I crazy, or are these differences between the best models so marginal that you’d get roughly the same performance if you use the same high-quality harness (ie preloaded instructions from md files, including custom skills)?

You will immediately notice the difference if you use it at the threshold. It's like most people just watching a 'starting nba player' (not superstar, but just starting player) vs one that sits on the bench. If you were to just watching them play, work out, shoot - you'd never notice the difference. Put them head to head and it's 98-54 and you start to see the patterns. It's pretty interesting actually, someone tell…

Head to head is interesting. I had not tried 2 agents on the same task simulateniously with 2 models.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#60

Post by yieldcrv »

viccis wrote: post #44
kvakkefly wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember this very clearly myself. Before opus 4.5, I was doing a lot of hand holding and was coding a lot myself, but I have not written code since that day more or less. I did write some stuff myself just to learn how the enigma encryption machine worked, so wrote myself to learn. But professionally, I stopped coding in November.

How do you justify your salary given that you're just using a tool that any of us could use for $20 an hour in your role?

no engineers on staff and stakeholders think the company is incompetent

Coinbase is paying the price for that for every UX glitch, after the CEO was gleeful about HR personnel shipping production code

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