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The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

simonwillison.net

411–420 of 631 posts

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#411

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

only SVG counts tho, dont know why

It's a test of text-based LLMs to see how good they are at SVG geometry. Video models are a different category of software entirely.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re missing the point. You claimed high quality and provided a repo. Did you not expect someone to actually look and critique it? Whether the visual bugs are a deal breaker or not isn’t the point. The point is that’s not high quality code, it may work. But it’s not code I would ship at my job and therefore it’s not high enough quality for anyone serious

Hey that's fine. You're free to make whatever judgment you wish. But I still stand by the quality of my code, including here. You and I don't need to agree. What decades of managing codebases (public and private, huge and small) has taught me is that there will always be an endless list of bugs and feature ideas and nice-to-haves and technical debt pressures in any given project. You'll never get to them all, so you…

tbh youve embarrassed yourself here.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, LLM's free up time for me so that I can spend time on the fun parts of coding. Less boilerplate, more focus on the interesting problems. This is no different from using high level languages. The problem domain is less around memory management and garbage collection and closer to the problem you're actually trying to solve.

But we’ve had tools to automate out the boilerplate for years. We don’t need ai for that. It’s seriously like we all forgot we could run one command and scaffold a project. AI isn’t even that great at it. Last I tried a month ago it used a really out of date version of nextjs and picked all sorts of random deps that weren’t in the plan. I could have just used the next project scaffold tool and been on my way before t…

Or copy paste another file and edit the 10 lines that are actually different. The nice thing is that when you have an epiphany that you’ve already done this twice and that it’s for the same purpose, so you abstract the code and remove 100 lines from the project.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not much more than a cursory glance too, but found "./sandbox/create.go", a ~1300 lines long file with so much duplication even within just itself that I stopped counting. Now it was a long time ago I did Go professionally, but I'm also in the camp of "That doesn't really count as high-quality", although I know for a fact you can get quality code out of LLMs, but I don't think that's a good showcase of that.

> I did not much more than a cursory glance too, but found "./sandbox/create.go", a ~1300 lines long file with so much duplication even within just itself that I stopped counting. Really? What duplication did you actually find? I count a few small ones in buildMounts and ReadPrompt, maybe 20 lines or so, but hardly anything worthy of such an epithet. Admittedly, the parsing & escaping code and some utility functions…

The duplication I'm seeing isn't just "same text repeated" but structural duplication. Doing a quick 5 minute look again just to give you some pointers; runtime.MountSpec construction in buildMounts, Workdir vs aux-dir mount-mode handling, repeated one-off mount append blocks, overlay detection and so on, the list goes on. Just those should account for 200+ lines.

Look for slight variations of the same thing but with different paths, variables, or modes and I think you'd be able to spot the rest as well.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#415
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not sure this is true for all of us. I bet many/some (unsure here) are told to use ai for their daily programming tasks.

“A tool so good its use is mandatory” :)

I actually use claudecode a lot, where it works it works very well for me.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#417

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Also the least fun part of development. Maybe I’m the weird one but I like to just jump right in, planning every last detail before writing code is boring.

For me, the fun in programming is sometimes to actually write code, solving a problem in a specific way or try some new approach. Other times the fun is to create something that works, and the code is more a means to an end. The first case I'll probably still do by hand, like handmade vases despite factory made are cheap and readily available. For the second case I think these newfangled tools have made it even more…

> I think these newfangled tools have made it even more fun, since writing lots of boiler plate, repetitive event handles and whatnot is not my idea of fun

That’s what code generators, snippets plugins, macros, and the old copy-paste are here for. I wonder if you were using notepad to code. Because even nano had macros.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I've quoted you two tools (Ghostty and Redis) whose development now regularly uses AI assistance to deliver production code. I quoted those because their authors shared their experiences, the strengths and the limits of the tooling.

There's many more, from Flask to Docker, from Ruby to FastAPI or Tanstack. LLVM has integrated AI-generated PRs, so did Swift and Mojo. Sasha Levin has pushed into Linux Nvidia-related kernel changes that were authored by LLMs in 6.15. You can be certain there's a magnitude more where people don't admit or tag their PRs as AI generated or co-generated.

In fact I am quite confident that projects and developers that are not leveraging the tools are increasingly rare. There's really no reason in 2026 to write a non-trivial PR and not ask a cheap review to an AI tool.

The industry is changing, I don't really like the trends I'm seeing, but to state that LLMs cannot and are not writing production code, very often quality ones, (especially when used, setup and overviewed properly) is plain denial.

Your anecdotal experience isn't relevant, especially when applied to the largest parts of the industry, composed of mediocre developers working on terrible codebases.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#419
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, I don't think the role of QA is to write automated tests - developers should be doing most of that work.

The best QA people I've worked with didn't write much code at all. You'd give them a new system and they'd find all of the bugs, testing obscure edge-cases that you'd never thought of.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh those pedals go all over the place indeed
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