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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

#261

Post by kstenerud »

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #248
kstenerud wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

I don't want to offend (it's AI coded anyway :)) but that does not scream "high quality" to me. The headline gif on that repo just paints a terrible picture. It can't draw a box correctly, there's random underscores all over the screen. The UI itself is just incredibly incoherent. I don't even know what I'm looking at. Like, no it doesn't seem like very high quality work... It just seems like a vibe coded tool. Edit:…

You do realize that you're complaining about the Claude Code TUI, right?

That's not what this product is; merely a tool it uses.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#262

Post by flakeoil »

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…

Does "creative" mean that you are creative at coming up with ideas or does it mean that you are artistic and can create stuff?

I suppose it is more the latter, and it's the artistic people who create stuff who will suffer. The ones coming up with ideas, but previously couldn't create becasuse they lacked skill might win thanks to AI.

Coming up with ideas is easy, creating and putting in the effort is hard (until we had AI).

Probably the value of created stuff will go down rapidly because there will be so much of it.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#264

Post by pell »

hollowturtle wrote: post #250
paulluuk wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty wild take. What percentage of human engineers are creating novel solutions for hard problems, you think? I work in R&D and even my work is 90% doing things that other people already solved. If you are really doing cutting edge SOTA work that has never been done by another human in some form or another, then kudos to you and I want your job.

> What percentage of human engineers are creating novel solutions for hard problems, you think? IMO Every engineer should try spending his time in a company that tries to solve new problems. Otherwise we will be stuck, as we are now, with big tech paying you mountains of money for doing nothing, incentivizing you to embark on useless activities for letting other managers have a career, fear layoffs and when that happ…

> IMO Every engineer should try spending his time in a company that tries to solve new problems.

Yet typically 95% of software developers mainly work on CRUD-type apps. Coding agents are not perfect there either but they’re really a lot more reliable than they were a few months ago.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#265

Post by layer8 »

jaccola wrote: post #231
hollowturtle wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please do not cite Dunning–Kruger effect at random. Who needs to generate a dumb demo of a 97% done crud app? We had code generators for those, everytime I read claims like that and I ask to explain further I then discover it's people who were not productive before generating the so called "MVP level things to completion with ease". If you're trying to solve a HARD problem people REALLY have, it's a novelty that agen…

The obvious pushback to all of the slop is: coding was never hard. Learning resources were abundant and free. If these people had a burning desire to build things prior to LLMs and couldn’t put in the effort to learn to build them (which is also fun!) then why would they ever put the effort into anything to understand it and make it good??

> coding was never hard. Learning resources were abundant and free.

Just a nitpick regarding “never”: Learning resources weren’t abundant and free 25 years ago, that’s a more recent development.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#266

Post by eloisant »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #212
notachatbot123 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Counter-point, real incriminating videos will be easy to dismiss.

"No that's not me, that's AI"

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#267

Post by AussieWog93 »

hollowturtle wrote: post #228
treme wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 moti…

Please do not cite Dunning–Kruger effect at random. Who needs to generate a dumb demo of a 97% done crud app? We had code generators for those, everytime I read claims like that and I ask to explain further I then discover it's people who were not productive before generating the so called "MVP level things to completion with ease". If you're trying to solve a HARD problem people REALLY have, it's a novelty that agen…

I don't really see your point. Most problems that people have aren't really super-novel, but just extremely bespoke.

To give a specific example, 12 months ago I had a client pay me me to make a Chrome plugin that changed the rows in his Shopify Products page to display Quantity and SKU.

These days you'd just one-shot it in Claude.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#268

Post by AussieWog93 »

grey-area wrote: post #173
jimbobthemighty wrote: post #161

I asked Gemini for a video of 'pelican riding a unicycle in hyde park' - I was blown away by the output: https://gemini.google.com/share/55e250c99693

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

I wouldn't be that concerned that animation is going anywhere. Both outputs look really off, especially around the feet.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#269

Post by iLoveOncall »

harshitaneja wrote: post #215
iLoveOncall wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're completely twisting what I said. I've never talked about people claiming it's not making developers obsolete. We are obviously extremely far from that. I'm talking about people who say it doesn't work to build basic features in their projects correctly.

Just take a look at this comment on a different topic, which lists all the pre-requisite for those AI models to work well, from the perspective of someone who has bought into the hype: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48157235

If this is everything needed for an LLM to generate acceptable code, what is even the point of them?

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#270

Post by grey-area »

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…

That’s really not how this is going to play out.

When advertising agencies for example see that their copywriter can go from idea to concept with a video generator instead of engaging an animator, they’ll simply cut the middleman who used to create that animation for them and use the tool instead, even if the content isn’t as good (though the quality of this one is really pretty good, there are obvious problems). They’ll happily accept mediocrity to save money.

People will still create adverts but quality and creativity will go down and a lot of jobs are going to be suddenly displaced.

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