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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

#211

Post by Retric »

drdaeman wrote: post #191
grey-area wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s really impressive, and slightly worrying for creatives involved in film, animation or modelling.

It’s the opposite, non-creatives (if such roles even exist in those industries) should be worried. All those models offset technical skills, allowing to get from idea to implementation through a different route (which can be easier or harder depending on idea and model - good luck tweaking that pelican’s exact pose and movements to match your imagination precisely ). Nothing touches creativity, not even in the slight…

My mother has started watching 100% AI generated stories on YouTube. They are good enough to be entertaining even if they include random errors like messing up the main character’s name.

The thing is the creative economy is all about people’s attention and pocketbooks, it doesn’t need to be great just good enough.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#212

Post by dzhiurgis »

notachatbot123 wrote: post #177
grey-area wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s really impressive, and slightly worrying for creatives involved in film, animation or modelling.

Even more worrying are the implications for fakenews, propaganda, fraud, deception and mental health.

Maybe short term yes. But longer term people will finally put their guard up against deception that’s been around for decades.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#213

Post by azuanrb »

gib444 wrote: post #107
RobinL wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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?

It depends on what you’re comparing it against. For $20, OpenAI is still probably the best value for SOTA models. In terms of limits, you can use GPT-5.4 instead of 5.5. The intelligence feels similar, but it’s cheaper. You can also experiment with other harnesses like pi. It’s lightweight but capable enough, and its token usage is definitely much more efficient.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#214

Post by Razengan »

hollowturtle wrote: post #209

> The coding agents got really good It's since november 2025, the so called "inflection point", that I'm still wondering for who coding agents become "really good". All I observe they got better at tool call and answering questions about big codebases, especially if the question has a vague pattern to search, and they're superuseful for that! For generating production code even with a lot of steering and baby sitting…

> It's since November 2025, the so called "inflection point", that I'm still wondering for who coding agents become "really good".

You can dig up my past comments semi-arguing with simonw where I said AI just isn't good enough yet, but lately I've been using Codex mostly just to review existing Godot/GDScript code: https://github.com/InvadingOctopus/comedot

and now I'd say that in this day and age one would have to be dumb to not use AI in SOME way :)

It's helped me catch a lot of bugs that would have taken me a long time to even notice on my own. I guess it helps that the project is modular enough where most files can be considered standalone, with just 1-2 dependencies and well-commented already, so the AI can look at each file on its own one at a time. You can see the AGENTS.md I use on that repo.

Most of my productivity in the last 3 or so months has been thanks to AI, though none of the code there is AI generated. I even bought a MacBook Neo just to use as an "AI thin client" while on travel, even though I already had a beefy MacBook Pro M2 Max that I just keep at home/hotel as a desktop now. Codex's recent remote control features have made it more useful for the moments when I get a cool idea while out at a cafe or on a walk.

I don't just copy-paste the AI's output, because it's often inefficient anyway (like creating redundant variables/functions), but I find its findings useful for manually cleaning up my shit. Maybe their training data is not that good with GDScript yet which is a bit of a jank language anyway.

So my core code is wholly made by meat, but I do have fun now and then telling Codex to make experimental games using only the library of modular components I have written so far, to test my framework and also the AI's abilities. This kind of work seems like a surprisingly good match for AI: It just has to put existing blocks together, that already have well-defined interfaces/contracts etc.

I've been on the $20 ChatGPT plan for about a year now, and only started using Codex since like maybe 4 months ago, almost always on the latest model with "Extended Thinking" or "Extra High", because I want my shared code to be as correct as possible because everything else I do depends on it, and I only hit limits like 2 times in the last 3 months.

Claude on the other hand, terrible: https://i.imgur.com/jYawPDY.png

Grok is OK for general stuff, never tried it for coding.

Gemini's UI/UX and lack of privacy and the AI itself is so terrible I tried it just maybe 2 times ever...and it refused to work on Google's own Flights website and reverse image search! (it told me to do it myself)

Deepseek refused to talk about Taiwan or Tiananmen Square so I'm not sure if I can trust it for anything else lol

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#215

Post by harshitaneja »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #184
Insanity wrote: post #10

I wonder how much the 'inflection point' is a thing vs marketing. I'm sure the models got somewhat better, but even now when I'm trying to 'vibe code' a game with the latest models (combination of Codex w/ gpt5.5 and gpt5.3-codex), they really do struggle. They definitely get something barebones up and running, but it's far from a fully fledged application.

It is all marketing. The easiest way to tell is that a year ago the same people said the inflection point was X or Y model. When people claim LLMs just don't work for them, the first question is whether they're using the latest model or not, and if not, dismissing the poster. The thing is that that same question was being asked a year ago, and even a year before that, but with the models that lead to a dismissal toda…

I think it's because both sides are talking about different things. If you go in expecting it is good enough to make developers obsolete today(reasonable impression to get from the way a lot of people hype it) you would be disappointed and after first couple of tries every few months you would probably not try it much with next generations. Reasonable if it's considered a dichotomy.

But a lot of people excited about new generations(including me, now) are not seeing it as a dichotomy but rather a spectrum where models are getting better and indeed once a year or even 6 months at times there comes a sudden growth which feels like an inflection point from what came before. Practically, it's a tool like any other, you evaluate it based on if it's worth the effort and cost for the benefit you get from it and if it is and has a good DX you use it. If the calculation doesn't work for you, it doesn't. For me, it has gone from a novelty, to good for some kind of quick manual search, to I guess it can debug some kind of errors at times in very specific conditions, to hey I think I am getting a bit addicted to autocomplete in IDE provided by them even if I don't use them for anything intelligent but it's becoming indispensable now but only this part, to it's good for areas I lack expertise in, to agentic sucks I will stick with discussing algorithms and architecture with it on greenfield projects, to holy shit it can do agentic decently well now, I am skeptic to give it access more than in limited cases, to now I am getting close to letting it run free on my device in not so distant future I guess. Some of these were big jumps, at each point I was skeptical of growth. Everytime I thought now the growth will slow down from days 2k context window to millions now. From basic chat completion to working on complex adaptive systems, game theoretic modelling, heurestics and constraint modelling and other things I throw at it. I am still needed in the loop, it can be so smart at times and then will do something so stupid, but the frequency of stupidity is rapidly decreasing. I am still needed, I don't think it could accomplish alone all that it has done for me. But I do at times at night remain awake reflecting on my self worth for the potential day when I don't add that value. When I have a harder time keeping up.

Also had someone told me not in even 2019 that in 2026 we could have NLP models do what they do today, I would have posited it all as sci-fi and here I am waking up in awe of the world we live in and how quickly we adapt.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#216

Post by ionwake »

why is there no talk about the world is already run by AI by proxy? ie bureaucrats using chatgpt to make their speeches decisions shopfront designs etc. I just dont seem to read about this, intead its more this nebulous specific date in the future

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#217

Post by _puk »

ant6n wrote: post #208
_puk wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Opus 4.6 at its peak was the "how can anyone not get that this is good" for me. Then the nerf, and the massive uplift in tokens for 4.7, a model which I find lazy and prone to hallucinate. It's probably time to try GPT5.5. Like many I'm pretty heavily invested in the anthropic ecosystem at this point, which I suppose gives another strong reason to make the switch.

I only used Claude first time in April, previously only ChatGPT and Gemini. And I struggle to see what the hype is all about - yes it seems a tiny bit smarter than the pack, but on the 20$ subscription it runs out of tokens in 5-20 minutes, and then you need to wait 3-4h. ChatGPT 5.5 seems capable, although a bit stingy with “thinking” compared to earlier models, and I never run into session limits.

I couldn't imagine using CC on the basic tier!

Even operations and GTM are all at "professional" level (which I think is vaguely equivalent to 5x).

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#219

Post by kstenerud »

hollowturtle wrote: post #209

> The coding agents got really good It's since november 2025, the so called "inflection point", that I'm still wondering for who coding agents become "really good". All I observe they got better at tool call and answering questions about big codebases, especially if the question has a vague pattern to search, and they're superuseful for that! For generating production code even with a lot of steering and baby sitting…

The polarization comes from the very disparate coding experiences and output quality that different people find when using these tools.

For example, I've had the opposite experience of yours, generating very high quality work using Claude (such as https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai). Just in dealing with all the bugs and idiosyncrasies in the technologies I'm using, the agent has been a godsend in discovering and cataloguing them so that the implementation phase doesn't keep tripping over them: https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai/blob/main/docs/dev/backe...

And the agents keep getting better all the time. Even in the past month I've noticed a considerable jump in its ability to anticipate issues and correctly infer implications as we build out research, design, architecture and planning docs. By the time it comes to coding, it's mostly a mechanical process that can be passed off to sonnet with a negligible defect rate.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#220

Post by treme »

hollowturtle wrote: post #209

> The coding agents got really good It's since november 2025, the so called "inflection point", that I'm still wondering for who coding agents become "really good". All I observe they got better at tool call and answering questions about big codebases, especially if the question has a vague pattern to search, and they're superuseful for that! For generating production code even with a lot of steering and baby sitting…

you are experiencing reverse Dunning–Kruger effect.

For someone that just dabbled in coding prior, it went from AI building 80%, and struggling through to finish the 20% when trying to build an app/website.

now it's like 97% and struggling with last 3%. Yes it'll look rough around the edges when evaulated by a senior dev, but being able to build MVP level things to completion with ease helps you stay engaged and motivated to continue and learn.

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