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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

#401

Post by skydhash »

layer8 wrote: post #265
jaccola wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe in some parts of the world (including mine). But we haven’t have a lot of computers either. But 25 years ago, there was a lot of textbooks and computers editors like O’Reilly already active. I had the C programming language book (not 25 years ago, but the book is older than that) and you could learn a lot with that one book and codeblocks. Same thing with “The Go Programming Language”, “Learning Perl”, and “Programming Clojure”. You only need one book to get very decent.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#402

Post by Glohrischi »

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…

I had a really fun day yesterday because anthropics limits on their normal 20$ subscription allowed me to play around for the whole day without hitting a limit.

Its 'production' code because its a small browser game which has very small to 0 requirements on security and being perfect but high requirements on 'ever even doing this' and 'fun'.

The code it generated hat 0 compiletime errors. I was able to descripe 10 things to do in one task and it just jugged along solving all of them.

This doesn't need to become so much better to be useful. Its already very useful for a lot ofuse cases like researchers which have to verify the math anyway but are not good in writing code for filtering their testdata, converting them and running it.

Small websites, fun projects, helper tools etc.

But while we speak, in the background stuff is still happening left and right. More compute, better algorithm, more RL etc.

We could already be at 95% at 'ai will take your coding job' without knowing because these 5% are so relevant.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#403

Post by simonw »

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…

Give me a "hard problem" and I'll give you a Codex or Claude Code transcript showing how I'd use them to tackle it.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#404

Post by horsawlarway »

IdiotSavage wrote: post #350
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

Graphically perfect, but content-wise nonsense. The pelican's center of gravity is clearly behind the wheel. It needs to be above or very slightly ahead of the wheel.

I don't think it's graphically perfect either.

The length of the pedals keeps changing, and you'll notice that neither of the pedals actually rotates around the hub: consistent with your point about the center of gravity being too far back, the circle the pedals are making is also shifted back too far.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#405

Post by embedding-shape »

malfist wrote: post #400
embedding-shape wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Take it up with Anthropic. It's actually their billion-dollar TUI product you're commenting on. That's like blaming the company making hammers because you're unable to build a lasting house with the hammer, it really isn't up to Anthropic, but all about how you use the tool you're holding.

This analogy was trotted out every time someone complained about PHP. It wasn't true then, and it isn't true now.

I don't see how it cannot be true. Are you claiming that every developer who uses the same LLM harness + model would produce equal code, regardless of the prompt? That's clearly not true in my experience, and I cannot understand how it could be either.

And if that's not true, then it's quite literally about how you're holding this hammer.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#406

Post by hollowturtle »

nayroclade wrote: post #301
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". The answer is "for lots of people, but not you". You're doing a vague impression of being fair and even-handed, arguing for non-polarization, but underlying everything you're saying is an obvious attitude of poralizing superiority: That _your_ personal experience with AI is the real truth…

When I say

> Absolutely not, not quite there not even close in my experience.

I obviously mean in my experience, not the real truth.

> That everyone else is being led by a "marketing hype

That is obvious instead, and I later say there's not 0s or 1s, every job has his intrincancies

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#407

Post by hiw2d »

Glohrischi wrote: post #402
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…

I had a really fun day yesterday because anthropics limits on their normal 20$ subscription allowed me to play around for the whole day without hitting a limit. Its 'production' code because its a small browser game which has very small to 0 requirements on security and being perfect but high requirements on 'ever even doing this' and 'fun'. The code it generated hat 0 compiletime errors. I was able to descripe 10 th…

"We could already be at 95% at 'ai will take your coding job' without knowing because these 5% are so relevant."

This is nonsense. Im not a SWE but a CEO, if that were true I'd be firing without a hitch. And yet this is not the activity we see. Why is that? Perhaps merely writing code is not the entire job.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#408

Post by simonw »

abc123abc123 wrote: post #358
grey-area wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deeply troubling for so many reasons. Please try to get her to stop.

What's the problem? If I enjoy some show, material or text, if it brings me value or a brief moment of happiness, I could care less if it was made by an AI or a human. This racism against AI-generated stuff has to stop. If not, we'll have a butlerian jihad on our hands that will set back prosperity, development and science for decades, perhaps centuries. People mention the artists... ohh, boohoo... either do it on yo…

Racism?

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#409

Post by hollowturtle »

epolanski wrote: post #383
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…

> But we should stop talking about 1s and 0s I agree, but you contradicted yourself just one line above. > For generating production code even with a lot of steering and baby sitting? Absolutely not Moreover this is further in contradiction with several facts: 1. the majority of this industry has always been composed by mediocre/bad developers, often unable to write a fizz buzz 2. the majority of work in this industr…

>> But we should stop talking about 1s and 0s

> I agree, but you contradicted yourself just one line above.

>> > For generating production code even with a lot of steering and baby sitting? Absolutely not

with this last sentence I obviously meant in my experience, it's not that hard. I don't buy your facts are highly biased towards web development, that's a common mistake here on HN to think it's the totality of the industry, luckily it's not

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#410

Post by Falimonda »

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…

Which languages and subject matter do you work with?
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