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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

#111

Post by angled »

beng-nl wrote: post #91
angled wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In business: using coworking tools to review and propose filing of emails; manage my files and folders; on a daily basis scour the intranet for interesting and relevant content. Personal: my wife tutors in her native language to non-native primary and high school kids. They are all using these tools now generate fresh content for practice based on school lesson plans. The kids are improving much more quickly now than…

As someone who works somewhere where the intranet is a bit of a jungle: what tool do you use to scour the intranet? Thanks!

Copilot Cowork in the M365 ecosystem. It inherits all the permissions from my account, has access to exchange to send me emails, and OneDrive to save each day’s summary for posterity and future refinement.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#112

Post by BOOSTERHIDROGEN »

alexwwang wrote: post #109
LZ_Khan wrote: post #57

I'm curious how the 6 months have looked from a non-programmer's perspective. What kind of co-working tools and similar optimizations have people from other fields experienced?

As a former data scientist, I started to use code agent 3 monthes ago. Before that, I use chat completion on web. Now, I nearly do everything which outputs documents with code agent.

Can you give a sanitized example or a hypothetical scenario of what you mean by “output documents with code agents”? Thanks.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#114

Post by koonsolo »

trojans1290 wrote: post #95
vanuatu wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there will be larger markets, more companies, more jobs than before due to AI, but also a very painful transition period AI reduces the cost of producing software (and other intellectual tasks), which greatly improves the viability for more and more ambitious projects. As far as we know the amount of problems software (and humanity) can solve is unbounded It feels like the market has shifted in SWE yet again…

What are these skills?

Being able to work with an infinite amount of dumb interns that work super fast and have a vast amount of knowledge.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#115

Post by angled »

RobinL wrote: post #101
conception wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude in Office was a tipping point for nontechnical folks around me. Everyone’s slides decks are immaculate now. Finance isn’t needing nearly as much BI help. It’s pretty impressive.

Interesting. I don't have to use PowerPoint much, but I hate it when I do. I don't want the llm to write the words but I do want it to make things look nice. So does this work well now?

My pipeline for this is vscode + prompts + markdown templates + GitHub copilot -> markdown docs -> pandoc to produce.docx -> copilot in word for “nice” formatting -> copilot in ppt for nice decks. LLMs all the way down.

I find it’s easier to version control and diff the .md artefacts, those remain my authoritative source.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#116

Post by opto »

LZ_Khan wrote: post #57

I'm curious how the 6 months have looked from a non-programmer's perspective. What kind of co-working tools and similar optimizations have people from other fields experienced?

I am an instructor who helps deliver an apprenticeship. My new boss has been in our industry for about 20 years and is one of the most respected people in our company. They've just joined us to teach and are off doing a two week course. On the first day she was told to let AI write all of her lesson plans, and then feed the lesson plans to AI to make her slides...

Hopefully she rejects all this out of hand, but if she doesn't it'll mean that none of our trainees get the benefit of her experience, who she is as a person, and what she has to pass onto them.

We have 6 monthly reviews as instructors where we are told the same thing. "How could you use AI for your teaching?"

They don't even feel the need to justify why this would be desirable, or is needed at all. It's just pure bandwagonning. Unbelievably, most of my coworkers are extremely positive about AI, although none of them have told me they use it for anything besides preparing their lessons for them — they just use it instead of having to think, or spend time preparing...the only important thing they do at work.

It makes no sense to me.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#117

Post by BOOSTERHIDROGEN »

musebox35 wrote: post #51
viccis wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you justify your salary given that you're just using a tool that any of us could use for $20 an hour in your role?

Please see Ben Evans’ podcast on a good take on this. Coding is just one of the task you do in your job, it is not the job or at least it probably is not. You do not get paid to code, you get paid to make a set of decisions that create value to the company. If this is automated then yes sadly your salary is not justified.

Which episode ?

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#118

Post by koonsolo »

nl wrote: post #27
bluegatty wrote: post #17

'Producing Images' or even 'Some Code that is Valid and Compiles' is in some ways one of the most misleading ways we assess quality of the AI. It is getting very good at producing code that compiles - at the algorithmic level. This is definitely noteworthy - and the AI is crossing a critical 'productivity threshold'. But 'Drawing of a Proper Duck' is almost arbitrary because it may have nothing to do with the ' Speci…

> But 'Drawing of a Proper Duck' is almost arbitrary because it may have nothing to do with the 'Specific Duck You Wanted'. That might be the case, but Simon's case "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" is very different. The model actually has to understand what parts of a pelican and bicycle come together in something like an anatomically plausible way. That's a higher level of abstraction than something…

> That might be the case, but Simon's case "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" is very different.

When it was new, sure. Right now, models can be trained on that because everybody uses it as a benchmark.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#119

Post by grey-area »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #113

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.

They were able to one-shot famous games (like asteroid or pong), I suspect because they had been trained on multiple versions of that game. So like producing Harry Potter, with the right prompt it was able to produce a license stripped version of code it had seen. I tried another arcade game like frogger and it failed really badly and took a lot longer, never got it working.

The whole exercise left me feeling they have a long way to go, I don’t see how anyone could think they would replace SWE unless they didn’t look at the code produced, even now.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#120

Post by Gigachad »

conception wrote: post #66
LZ_Khan wrote: post #57

I'm curious how the 6 months have looked from a non-programmer's perspective. What kind of co-working tools and similar optimizations have people from other fields experienced?

Claude in Office was a tipping point for nontechnical folks around me. Everyone’s slides decks are immaculate now. Finance isn’t needing nearly as much BI help. It’s pretty impressive.

Can I get Claude to view the slide decks for me so I don't waste my time?
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