I asked Gemini for a video of 'pelican riding a unicycle in hyde park' - I was blown away by the output:
The last six months in LLMs in five minutes
161–170 of 631 posts
Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes
#162All I see is mention of how various models generate image of "pelican riding bicycle(s)"
We all know the true test of AI is Will Smith eating spaghetti.
Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes
#163I wonder how much the 'inflection point' is a thing vs marketing. I'm sure the models got somewhat better, but even now when I'm trying to 'vibe code' a game with the latest models (combination of Codex w/ gpt5.5 and gpt5.3-codex), they really do struggle. They definitely get something barebones up and running, but it's far from a fully fledged application.
I've "vibed" some non-trivial stuff lately using a combination of Codex with 5.5 and Claude Code with Opus 4.7. Key has been to spend a fair amount of time on initial overall design document, which is split into tangible and limited phases. I go back and forth between them on this document until we're all happy. For each phase an implementation plan is made. At the end, a summary document of what was delivered and wh…
> Key has been to spend a fair amount of time on initial overall design document, which is split into tangible and limited phases.
> For each phase an implementation plan is made. At the end, a summary document of what was delivered and what was discovered.
> I do check the documents, and what they're doing. I also check the tests, some more thorough.
Sounds like programming, but with extra steps.
Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've "vibed" some non-trivial stuff lately using a combination of Codex with 5.5 and Claude Code with Opus 4.7. Key has been to spend a fair amount of time on initial overall design document, which is split into tangible and limited phases. I go back and forth between them on this document until we're all happy. For each phase an implementation plan is made. At the end, a summary document of what was delivered and wh…
That’s not vibing, but waterfall development.
Waterfall was famous for wasting developer time and extending delivery dates in exchange for simplifying management. If Claude time is comparatively inexpensive, but human oversight remains necessary, we will switch back to waterfall because the relative importance of the two resources will invert.
Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes
#165If you're a vulnerability researcher or a security person generally, there's a big inflection point from Spring of this year.
If it turns out to be a good change or not is to be seen. The half-full view is that the models are so good at finding vulns that if you plug them into your build-pipeline then the amount of new vulns introduced will go down towards zero. The half-empty view is that we're now producing more junior-level code with less review, so everything will have more vuln, also it's cheaper and easier to find them so prepare for…
There's a major caveat to the half-full view: You'll only stop adding new vulns that your model can find.
A threat actor with access to a better model or more money to burn on tokens may yet find more. Some of them have deep pockets, and not nearly every project will get the Glasswing treatment of free Mythos tokens.
Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes
#166I wonder how much the 'inflection point' is a thing vs marketing. I'm sure the models got somewhat better, but even now when I'm trying to 'vibe code' a game with the latest models (combination of Codex w/ gpt5.5 and gpt5.3-codex), they really do struggle. They definitely get something barebones up and running, but it's far from a fully fledged application.
Purely vibe code won't work. You need to define an excellent architecture, have great specs, a solid plan, divide the plan in small phases that fit well in a context window, use TDD and automated code reviews for implementing each phase, do QA and some code review. At any point you need to have agents review, verify and test the other agents output and iterate until the output is perfect. And also, have good e2e test…
Sounds very self confident to claim such thing. Something like "If you don't do how me is doing, then you are doing it wrong"
Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes
#167Does this guy have a "publish to front page of HN" button on his blog editor?
He’s pretty well known in the HN community. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Willison
Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes
#168what are your thoughts on Software engineer replacement. My team has already seen big reductions. Q/A team is gone. Software Engineer reduced by a third. Scared for the future
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…
The problems in any domain are infinite. But, alas, money is not.
Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes
#169> Google released the Gemma 4 series of models, which are the most capable open weight models I’ve seen from a US company. Implying another country has a better model? I'm being pokey here because I'm very curious! I know Gemma is efficient, but I also remember Qwen and Kiwi being referred to as optimized. The difference being that Gemma is using less tokens, but maybe Qwen/Kiwi's quality is higher? I dont know.
The consensus right now is that Qwen3.6 in its 27B and 35B-A3B versions is better for coding whereas Gemma4 is stronger when it comes to OCR, audio transcription and the likes. Margins are slim though and the harness at these model sizes is the most important factor.
Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes
#170Earlier 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?
If you don't want an LLM to write the words, surely you also want to decide on the data and graphs to show by yourself? Isn't that 90% of a presentation? The "looking nice" part doesn't matter as much, it could be black text on a white background and it would be fine.
The important part is the presentation matching your presenting cadence, which is something LLM generated presentations never get right. I don't have a problem with people generating presentations, but most of the time they just end up reading whatever is on the screen when presenting.