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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

#101

Post by RobinL »

conception wrote: post #66
LZ_Khan wrote: post #57

I'm curious how the 6 months have looked from a non-programmer's perspective. What kind of co-working tools and similar optimizations have people from other fields experienced?

Claude in Office was a tipping point for nontechnical folks around me. Everyone’s slides decks are immaculate now. Finance isn’t needing nearly as much BI help. It’s pretty impressive.

Interesting. I don't have to use PowerPoint much, but I hate it when I do. I don't want the llm to write the words but I do want it to make things look nice. So does this work well now?

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#102

Post by satvikpendem »

krzyk wrote: post #88
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.

It is sad. I like programming, if I couldn't do it and had to write text (which I do hate, I'm not a writer) it would be make quite a sad world.

Of course you can always program by hand, no one is stopping you.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#103

Post by Timwi »

musebox35 wrote: post #51
viccis wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Coding is just one of the task[s] you do in your job

But it's by far the most fun part and the only reason to take such a job...

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#104

Post by hansmayer »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #78
bsder wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the tool will happily give you a "solution" that kinda works for a few inputs. It will happily correct itself when you give it more incorrect tests. It will almost never converge on the general solution that will pass tests you haven't given it yet. This is why AI is sooo good at Javascript and related slop. A solution that "kinda works" is good enough 9 times out of 10 and if some tests fail well ... YOLO an…

To be fair, take away a human's paren highlighting and see how well they do.

Not everyone is a "coder" you know, some of us are engineers.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#105

Post by RobinL »

gib444 wrote: post #89

Starting from zero today, how would someone quickly get upto speed with the latest and greatest AI tooling on an extremely limited budget? Is the only choice to pay for the "max" plans? Or just read so much about it that you bs your way through an interview and then use the company's resources? Simon, I'm curious too how much you invest each month researching all the latest and great AI tech?

$20 chatgpt pro plan gives pretty generous usage both of codex, general chat

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#107

Post by gib444 »

RobinL wrote: post #105
gib444 wrote: post #89

Starting from zero today, how would someone quickly get upto speed with the latest and greatest AI tooling on an extremely limited budget? Is the only choice to pay for the "max" plans? Or just read so much about it that you bs your way through an interview and then use the company's resources? Simon, I'm curious too how much you invest each month researching all the latest and great AI tech?

$20 chatgpt pro plan gives pretty generous usage both of codex, general chat

Ah I'd read so much about the downgrading of that plan I didn't think that was still true?

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#108

Post by koonsolo »

simonw wrote: post #80
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

Ditching the QA team when the single highest challenge is verifying that vibe-coded systems do what they're meant to is extraordinarily short-sighted. Personally, the more time I spend working with coding agents the least worried I am for my career. Getting the best results out of them is really hard . They amplify existing skills and experience, so the more experience you have the better.

Have you seen the automated tests that QA members deliver? My experience is that they are horrible, and it's not so hard to beat that low quality bar with an LLM.

I have a theory: if they were good at writing automated tests, they would have been developers instead of QA engineers.

Not saying that there aren't any high quality QA engineers, I worked with some. But LLM's raised the bar in a way that most QA engineers can't reach.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#109

Post by alexwwang »

LZ_Khan wrote: post #57

I'm curious how the 6 months have looked from a non-programmer's perspective. What kind of co-working tools and similar optimizations have people from other fields experienced?

As a former data scientist, I started to use code agent 3 monthes ago. Before that, I use chat completion on web. Now, I nearly do everything which outputs documents with code agent.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#110

Post by aaronbrethorst »

nickvec wrote: post #20
shepherdjerred wrote: post #7

> and there’s zero chance any AI lab would train a model for such a ridiculous task. I'm not sure that's true anymore considering how popular Simon's blog is

Simon mentions further along in his article that given Jeff Dean’s post referencing the pelican-riding-a-bike task (and how good current models are at doing it), that it’s no longer a great benchmark to use. Enter the opossum riding an e-scooter!

Banana man on the Segway
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