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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

#181

Post by dawnerd »

OakNinja wrote: post #123
Timwi wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Coding is just one of the task[s] you do in your job But it's by far the most fun part and the only reason to take such a job...

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 Last I tried a month ago it used a really out of date version of nextjs and picked all sorts of random deps that weren’t in the plan.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 the ai even started returning output.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#182

Post by nopurpose »

magicalhippo wrote: post #92
Insanity wrote: post #10

I 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…

Do you use anything to orcheatrate multiple agent pitted against each other (coder, reviewer, tester, etc)?

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#184

Post by iLoveOncall »

Insanity wrote: post #10

I 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.

It is all marketing. The easiest way to tell is that a year ago the same people said the inflection point was X or Y model.

When people claim LLMs just don't work for them, the first question is whether they're using the latest model or not, and if not, dismissing the poster.

The thing is that that same question was being asked a year ago, and even a year before that, but with the models that lead to a dismissal today.

Just make the experiment yourself, wait 6 months, say LLMs just aren't working for the software engineering that you do, and people will dismiss you if you say that you use Opus 4.5 and not the latest model Claude MegaMind 8.8 pro max gigathinking. Despite this model being touted as the inflection point in this article.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#185

Post by dkersten »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #78
bsder wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the tool will happily give you a "solution" that kinda works for a few inputs. It will happily correct itself when you give it more incorrect tests. It will almost never converge on the general solution that will pass tests you haven't given it yet. This is why AI is sooo good at Javascript and related slop. A solution that "kinda works" is good enough 9 times out of 10 and if some tests fail well ... YOLO an…

To be fair, take away a human's paren highlighting and see how well they do.

While I certainly like parentheses highlighting and rainbow parentheses, I've programmed Clojure without syntax highlighting and while it’s not as nice as it would be with, it’s fine.

I’ve also written C++ and Java in Notepad long ago. Not ideal, but hardly a problem.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#186

Post by bradley13 »

opto wrote: post #116
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 sh…

I've been a teacher (most of the time a college professor) for...a long time. Nowadays, when preparing a new course, I definitely work with AI: "Here's what I want, and who my audience is - give me a course outline".

That gives me a starting point. Of course, I modify it. Maybe I bounce back and forth to the AI for further refinements and suggestions, but ultimately I have to be happy with the result.

When prepping the individual lessons, the biggest time saver is coming up with examples to illustrate particular points. I could do this alone, but sometimes that involves staring at a blank screen for a while. It is faster to ask the AI for suggestions, pick the one I like, and refine it further myself.

AI is a tool. Use it appropriately.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#187

Post by apsurd »

IshKebab wrote: post #174
apsurd wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it can be easily dismissed because "anyone can use the tool that costs $20" makes no meaningful sense. this was always true in fact $20 is more than the free it costs for notepad++ it's a flippant statement. Go down the line of any tool; it's cost has basically nothing to do with skill difference to operate it. See basically everything. There's levels.

I have no idea what you're trying to say. If anyone really can vibe code then programming salaries are pretty much guaranteed to come down. The critical question is whether it really is true that anyone can do it, or if it still requires rare skill.

are you a programmer? it 100% requires skill. AI or not.

i'm trying to say there's levels to this. if you don't agree then you don't agree. but i can buy commodity tools for any skill and that doesn't make me professional grade at that skill.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#188

Post by dawnerd »

vanuatu wrote: post #90
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 work at a company that deploys AI to enterprises The average office worker is amazed at Copilot (not in the IDE - but the app bundled with Windows), and they mostly copy paste material into their enterprise provided ChatGPT / Gemini, and get tips from Facebook / Instagram on their top 5 best prompts for work productivity Showing them agents that automate work at scale is a very magical experience

And then everyone that has to deal with their copy pasted output is too nice to say how bad it is and how much work it just offloads to the next person that’ll probably get frustrated and have an agent handle it.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#189

Post by peepee1982 »

viccis wrote: post #44
kvakkefly wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember this very clearly myself. Before opus 4.5, I was doing a lot of hand holding and was coding a lot myself, but I have not written code since that day more or less. I did write some stuff myself just to learn how the enigma encryption machine worked, so wrote myself to learn. But professionally, I stopped coding in November.

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?

I don't feel the need to justify my salary, since I'm simply lucky in that regard. But I'm pretty sure you couldn't do my job just because you had access to a coding agent. Most of my time at the office is spent discussing high-level architecture and strategy, ideas, customer requests, backward compatibility, safety, security, quality assurance, etc.

Writing the actual code is a significant part of that, but the codebase is so complex that even Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5 struggle with it without being fed a *lot* of context and constraints. And even then, they need a *lot* of steering due to making bad decisions that only someone with an intimate knowledge of the theory behind our software is able to catch.

I can only assume that people who think coding agents can completely replace an actual developer mostly deal with trivial software regarding both scope and the type of customers they serve (individuals instead of big companies in industry).

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#190

Post by tardedmeme »

2001zhaozhao wrote: post #97
bunzee wrote: post #93

Spot on. Building our tool, we found AI is magic at scraping competitor data, but terrible at market validation. The 'why' is strictly human.

So, the best way to use LLMs is to wait for your competitors to do market validation and then scrape their data. Hmmm......

It's always been much easier to copy an existing product than to make a new one nobody's thought of before.
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