Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

simonwillison.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 631 posts

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#221

Post by TrackerFF »

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?

Purely anecdotal, but in my team of 20 data analysts, we've seen a bunch of them become quite productive in producing tools and apps. These are analysts with mostly domain knowledge, and not so much programming knowledge - meaning that they knew the basics to write scripts, and wrangle data programmatically, but not enough to actually engage in software engineering.

Some of these are now contributors.

I also have a friend (beware, N=1 study) with zero prior programming knowledge that has released his first app.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#222

Post by skor »

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?

This is _the_ question we must all be able to answer, so here goes my attempt - we all have access to the same tools, before stackoverflow it was forums, books/manuals, so its always been about “getting there, showing up, figuring it out” your hypothetical boss has other things to do than kick a LLM around at that price

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#223

Post by hollowturtle »

Razengan wrote: post #214
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". You can dig up my past comments semi-arguing with simonw where I said AI just isn't good enough yet, but lately I've been using Codex mostly just to review existing Godot/GDScript code: https://github.com/InvadingOctopus/comedot and now I'd say that in this day and age one would have to b…

Thanks for sharing your experience! I totally agree that if you "own your code", as in you're invested in it, coding it and documenting it, these tools can be really valuable for review, bug fixing and maintenance, it pushes you to do better, maybe one piece at a time like you said with a good modularized codebase. I think more devs should share experiences like that, we should overthrow marketing and people narratives that "don't code anymore since X"

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#224

Post by layer8 »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #212
notachatbot123 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more worrying are the implications for fakenews, propaganda, fraud, deception and mental health.

Maybe short term yes. But longer term people will finally put their guard up against deception that’s been around for decades.

People will still believe what they want to believe.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#225

Post by tonyedgecombe »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #212
notachatbot123 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more worrying are the implications for fakenews, propaganda, fraud, deception and mental health.

Maybe short term yes. But longer term people will finally put their guard up against deception that’s been around for decades.

If they haven’t in the past I don’t see why they would now.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#226

Post by inglor_cz »

"there’s zero chance any AI lab would train a model for such a ridiculous task"

Hmm, given how small the nerd community is and how often I met that task either on Hacker News, or on various Substacks, I am not so sure that the AI labs would ignore it completely.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#227

Post by [deleted] »

kenloef wrote: post #100
simonw wrote: 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.

I believe that many of those saying that they "never write code anymore" or are experiencing "10x productivity," are heavily underestimating (or outright misrepresenting) how much they are guiding the model, and ignoring everything else that goes into shipping fit for purpose software. I frequently see zero measurements or factual arguments supplied to support such claims. I also see many people say that they are "vi…

[deleted]

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#228

Post by hollowturtle »

treme wrote: post #220
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…

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 agents can't help with, otherwise if it gets 97% there MAYBE it's just a signal that your idea isn't that novel!

LLMs can effectively validate your business idea

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#229

Post by jaccola »

Razengan wrote: post #214
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". You can dig up my past comments semi-arguing with simonw where I said AI just isn't good enough yet, but lately I've been using Codex mostly just to review existing Godot/GDScript code: https://github.com/InvadingOctopus/comedot and now I'd say that in this day and age one would have to b…

I set up a hook that reviews every commit and highlights potential bugs (async) and writes to a report to a dir.

Then I have a script that summarises that I usually run before pushing or at end of day.

Works quite well for both improving my code and the code ai wrote.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#230

Post by generationP »

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?

In pure maths:

- pre GPT-5.4: very limited use; some smart people got some mileage out of the models, but it always required serious work and a very suitable problem. Of course the models could solve homework problems, but that felt more like a downside to us who teach.

- since GPT-5.4 (Mar 2026): the "wow" release; suddenly answering MathOverflow-level problems that have previously been stumping experts. Still prone to hallucinations, but smart enough to use the built-in Python skill to verify its claims on small examples when possible. Probably a lot better at formula-heavy math than at the abstract "philosophical" kind.

- GPT-5.5: gave me a fascinating, significantly nontrivial and highly instructive "proof from the book" on an MO-hard problem that I'm in the process of writing up. Might have been luck and good prompting, though. Didn't really feel like a qualitative leap from 5.4, but I take quantitative any time. Still requires suitable problems, but it's much harder to rule out suitability from the get-go.

Claude and Gemini have been also-rans the whole time and still are. I use Claude for secretary-like tasks; occasionally it finds an easy proof too, but usually because I've missed something obvious.

Oh, and GPT, and to a lesser extent Claude, are great at hunting errors in maths. Probably 90% of my prompts so far have been for proofreading my writings.

Post reply on HN