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The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

simonwillison.net

291–300 of 631 posts

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#291

All I see is mention of how various models generate image of "pelican riding bicycle(s)"

Yes, the "pelican riding a bicycle" is the ultimate test of not understanding how LLMs work. Well, a combination of that and believing that replication of test data is a good measure of progress.

Spicy — why does it show ultimate non-understanding?

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to offend (it's AI coded anyway :)) but that does not scream "high quality" to me. The headline gif on that repo just paints a terrible picture. It can't draw a box correctly, there's random underscores all over the screen. The UI itself is just incredibly incoherent. I don't even know what I'm looking at. Like, no it doesn't seem like very high quality work... It just seems like a vibe coded tool. Edit:…

Take it up with Anthropic. It's actually their billion-dollar TUI product you're commenting on. The problem with being such a naysayer is that you're entirely disconnected from what's going on. You haven't tried an agent like Claude Code and experienced it for yourself, so you don't recognise what it looks like when it's in front of you.

I have tried Claude code. It doesn't look like that!

I don't know what the project is. All I see is a TUI that looks completely broken.

Go and use Claude Code right now. Does it look like that? Random underscores all over the page. No it doesn't.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that you're complaining about the Claude Code TUI, right? That's not what this product is; merely a tool it uses.

You claim "very high quality" but can't even get the basic UI working properly. You wrap tmux and a container in 2k lines of code and claim quality, I think the comment above was aimed at this claim.

The UI is working properly. Interfering with Anthropic's UI, or any of the other agent harness' UIs it supports, would be madness incarnate.

I also strongly suspect that you'd only taken a cursory glance at the top of the readme prior to passing judgment.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to offend (it's AI coded anyway :)) but that does not scream "high quality" to me. The headline gif on that repo just paints a terrible picture. It can't draw a box correctly, there's random underscores all over the screen. The UI itself is just incredibly incoherent. I don't even know what I'm looking at. Like, no it doesn't seem like very high quality work... It just seems like a vibe coded tool. Edit:…

You do realize that you're complaining about the Claude Code TUI, right? That's not what this product is; merely a tool it uses.

So why has your tool completely broken the Claude Code UI then?

Can't you see in the gif? It's completely broken. My Claude doesn't look like that. Neither does anyone else's.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#295
post #208
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Opus 4.6 at its peak was the "how can anyone not get that this is good" for me. Then the nerf, and the massive uplift in tokens for 4.7, a model which I find lazy and prone to hallucinate. It's probably time to try GPT5.5. Like many I'm pretty heavily invested in the anthropic ecosystem at this point, which I suppose gives another strong reason to make the switch.

I only used Claude first time in April, previously only ChatGPT and Gemini. And I struggle to see what the hype is all about - yes it seems a tiny bit smarter than the pack, but on the 20$ subscription it runs out of tokens in 5-20 minutes, and then you need to wait 3-4h. ChatGPT 5.5 seems capable, although a bit stingy with “thinking” compared to earlier models, and I never run into session limits.

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Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#296

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.

That's not how the human mind works. People still get skewed views on body standards even when they know that what they are looking at is biased and/or photoshopped, for example. When an AI fake stirs emotions just right, half the people will not even care about the truth.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#297
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 agen…

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Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#298
post #86
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Claude Mythos / Project Glasswing thing is real: https://www.anthropic.com/glasswing I met a few people at PyCon this week who have been part of Glasswing (they're just starting to be allowed to talk about it) and it really does drive down the cost of finding vulnerabilities. I've been collecting notes on that here: https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-security-research/

People in my company sounded underwhelmed by it. It usually was founding issues by not understanding deployment (or not being fed that info).

You might point them at the cloudflare blog about deploying mythos - I found it interesting. Upshot — as your folks discovered, deployment, harness, and utilization method matters for mythos and is a bit different than how you’d deploy a coding agent for writing code, but if you do that, you get something capable of end to end chaining and reasoning about a much broader class of vulnerabilities.

No personal experience with it. But the security team writeups I’ve read are significantly more positive about it than you describe, so it might be worth a second look.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#299

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.

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…

At what point is it easier and faster to just code it yourself? I don't trust myself to write better specs than code.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#300
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?

At work the tools handed to most are still essentially chatbots. Getting access to coding tools is an uphill battle because there isn’t really a good way to manage risk yet. Hard enough to keep a coding agent in check locally and ensure it does rm -rf anything. Scale that to thousands of people with limited skill and it doesn’t really work. So currently they just don’t.

That’s in a finance shop. I’d imagine it’s different in programming shops where handing people Claude code is a bit more plausible

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