Live data from Hacker News

The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

simonwillison.net

311–320 of 631 posts

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#311

> 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…

[flagged]

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why has your tool completely broken the Claude Code UI then? Can't you see in the gif? It's completely broken. My Claude doesn't look like that. Neither does anyone else's.

Claude Code will automatically "dumb" the TUI down a bit when it can't properly detect certain terminal capabilities, to avoid potential font rendering issues. Likely there are some terminal caps that aren't being properly preserved inside of the sandbox. It's never bothered me since the agent itself works fine.

Yeah, so whatever you're doing to wrap Claude is broken. Because it's breaking the UI.

"It's never bothered me". Cool. But your tool is bugged.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#314

My goal post for "AI will definitely replace most SWEs" was to reproduce a particular 90s programming game one shot and then add multiplayer support with minimal prompting. Opus 4.5 hit that point in November.

I tried this a while ago, haven’t tried again recently. The models were producing code that was clearly lifted from stuff in their training data, and what I ended up with was a fairly decent game in html and js after a bit of tidy up, though it felt like several code paradigms smooshed together rather than a coherent whole, but it mostly worked. Not something I’d want to maintain but it was impressive at the time. Th…

Out of curiosity - what harness did you use, and what model? And how are you prompting? In my mind prompting like:

“You’re going to make frogger in javascript. I want a complete clone of functionality for level 1, with amazing 80s era pixel art sprites. I’m super lazy, so you’re going to have to test everything, right from the start. Pick a test harness, write the tests, including tests for having amazing graphics, gameplay, input, UI, sounds, etc, and write a full workplan, then work through that workplan, in parallel where you can. The workplan should emphasize getting a stripped down version up immediately and have workstreams for all the major requirements after that. Add a final test that assesses how fun the game is by reviewing a real video of a test run. Loop on that final test until you can’t improve things any more.”

Should produce something playable with no further input. As you say, I’m not sure it would produce a codebase we’d want to look at or work on. But, I’d be surprised if this weren’t successful.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#315

Last 6 months is humanity losing control of LLMs. - Memory market cornering which mitigated the adoption of local AI despite great open model being released. - Fast penetration of IP exfiltrating tools in companies world-wide. - Developers producing more code that they can read. - Autonomous agents killing Open Source by siphoning the attention economy - Autonomous agents destroyed online communities (including HN) -…

If you only read bad news (i.e. mass news these days since that sells better) this will be the picture. But I have personally seen some insane stuff happen in biotech. Like, I can't believe we're lucky enough to possibly live our life in this kind of future. We already have actual therepeutics developed using Alphafold being tested right now in real clinical trials, but the next generation of stuff that will go into trials in the next 3-5 years will be insane. We will look back at current medicine like we look back at medieval times today.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#316

Last 6 months is humanity losing control of LLMs. - Memory market cornering which mitigated the adoption of local AI despite great open model being released. - Fast penetration of IP exfiltrating tools in companies world-wide. - Developers producing more code that they can read. - Autonomous agents killing Open Source by siphoning the attention economy - Autonomous agents destroyed online communities (including HN) -…

> Widespread vulnerabilities discovered

This is a good thing

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried this a while ago, haven’t tried again recently. The models were producing code that was clearly lifted from stuff in their training data, and what I ended up with was a fairly decent game in html and js after a bit of tidy up, though it felt like several code paradigms smooshed together rather than a coherent whole, but it mostly worked. Not something I’d want to maintain but it was impressive at the time. Th…

Out of curiosity - what harness did you use, and what model? And how are you prompting? In my mind prompting like: “You’re going to make frogger in javascript. I want a complete clone of functionality for level 1, with amazing 80s era pixel art sprites. I’m super lazy, so you’re going to have to test everything, right from the start. Pick a test harness, write the tests, including tests for having amazing graphics, g…

Sure give it a go, perhaps it will work better now with frontier models, I haven't tried it in a while (this was a year ago, things have improved since then). I'm not sure what tests for having amazing graphics, gameplay, input, UI, sounds, etc would look like, but it would be interesting to see the results!

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#318

> 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…

I don't know that there was an inflection point. I know that, over the past year, they definitely became useful to me as more than auto complete.

My most recent pet project is a transpiler from Wasm to Go, and I find it incredibly impressive that recent models (I've used Sonnet, Opus and Gemini, far more successfully than GPT), they're able to just pick up the project and work at all these levels:

- Go code that implements the transpiler (parsing Wasm, building an AST)

- Go code that gets generated by serializing the AST to a .go file

- Go code that manipulates the AST (to optimize it), and its effect on the generated code

- Go code that's grafted to the generated code (to implement more advanced opcodes) and how to interact with it from the AST

- C code that gets compiled to Wasm, then translated to Go, then called by Go

- Go code that gets called by this C code to implement a C stdlib

- WAT and WAST files that are used to implement the Wasm spec tests

I find this impressive because I have to think hard about all these levels, and I feel many programmers would have a problem with this.

And it's very often way easier for me to just write: "I want to generate this code, build me the AST that does it", than go "count parenthesis" in the Go code (I do have some LISP experience; it's still easier).

Feel free to scrutinize/criticize the code. Not vibe coded, but plenty of GenAI help.

https://github.com/ncruces/wasm2go

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

First of all it just underlines how shitty the web has become, second If that's your work I'd chase a career path where Claude can't one-shot this kind of dumb stuff

Curious, what's the career path you'd chase? Can you give examples of some work that you think Claude will never be able to one-shot?
Post reply on HN