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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

#321

Post by squidbeak »

hollowturtle wrote: post #271
jmcodes wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you consider a "hard" problem?

I don't know how to define hard problems. All I know is that we have a gigantic amount of tech debt we accumulated on the web chasing the next web framework built on top of tons of abstractions with very disappointing native web apis that shouldn't be taken seriously nor the w3c who specified them. And when an Agent it's capable of gluing together a web app with some crud backend with a very rounded corners UI, that…

You insist that AI needs to be able to tackle hard problems, but can't say what qualifies as a hard problem. Can you see the problem with that? If you don't know what a hard problem looks like, how do you know the models can't tackle them?

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#322

Post by HPsquared »

jaccola wrote: post #231
hollowturtle wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please do not cite Dunning–Kruger effect at random.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…

The obvious pushback to all of the slop is: coding was never hard. Learning resources were abundant and free. If these people had a burning desire to build things prior to LLMs and couldn’t put in the effort to learn to build them (which is also fun!) then why would they ever put the effort into anything to understand it and make it good??

The basic "language translation" part was never hard, but design is hard.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#323

Post by netcan »

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…

Coding goodness is just "unevenly distributed."

Irl, (a) different people's ways of working with ai are a million little islands and (b) bottlenecks vary enormously by coder and codebase/task.

Also... I think our era has an intrinsic bias that change=progress, productivity, etc.

Take the "networked computing revolution" of 1990-2000. These computers did land on every desk and every pocket. They are administration powerhouses. Excellent for all manner of administration tasks.

But... what this netted out to is "change." We send a lot more emails than we did letters. We communicate a ton. Secretaries went extinct. But "administration" grew.

A university faculty typically has more admins. Companies hire more accountants, HR, project managers, etc.

Maybe administration was never really a bottleneck.

Code has a lot of this. Everyone has a road map, wishlist, etc. It appears as though "code capacity" is the bottleneck. But maybe most of those companies can't really generate much more value from more software.

Anecdotally, it seems that many mid-tier shops are migrating/ modernizing their stack, and suchlike.

I haven't heard of many belting out features, and increasing prices or sales.

Most bottlenecks are upstream of another bottleneck. Few are a "dam."

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#324

Post by ryandrake »

wickedsight wrote: post #276
kstenerud wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The polarization comes from the very disparate coding experiences and output quality that different people find when using these tools. For example, I've had the opposite experience of yours, generating very high quality work using Claude (such as https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai ). Just in dealing with all the bugs and idiosyncrasies in the technologies I'm using, the agent has been a godsend in discovering and c…

> The polarization comes from the very disparate coding experiences and output quality that different people find when using these tools. Not just when using tools, also when using humans. The frame of reference of what is considered 'production code' differs immensely between organizations, teams and people. The code I get from LLM's is usually much better than what I get from my peers. Maybe not one shot, but after…

> The frame of reference of what is considered 'production code' differs immensely between organizations, teams and people.

I think it’s really down to this. Nobody can agree on what counts as production-quality code. I remember joining a company with what I think (hope) most of us would call horrible quality code. It was an absolute mess, barely compiled with hundreds of warnings, and had uncountable number of bugs. They didn’t even have a bug tracker so nobody even knew how many they had.

But the people working there already were so proud of it! None of them had ever worked for another company so they had no idea how bad their code was in comparison with the rest of the software industry (which itself is a very low bar). I told the founder we had a huge code quality problem and he looked at me like I had horns growing out of my head.

When someone says their LLM is producing “production-quality” code, actually look at it and see. Arguing about it on HN is pointless because everyone’s quality bar is different.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#325

Post by kstenerud »

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #312
kstenerud wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude Code will automatically "dumb" the TUI down a bit when it can't properly detect certain terminal capabilities, to avoid potential font rendering issues. Likely there are some terminal caps that aren't being properly preserved inside of the sandbox. It's never bothered me since the agent itself works fine.

Yeah, so whatever you're doing to wrap Claude is broken. Because it's breaking the UI. "It's never bothered me". Cool. But your tool is bugged.

Feel free to open a bug report if it bothers you. Or a PR.

Or feel free to avoid the tool entirely if this UI issue shakes your faith in its overall quality down to its very foundations.

This is hardly a hill to die on.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#326

Post by DeathArrow »

gib444 wrote: post #89

Starting from zero today, how would someone quickly get upto speed with the latest and greatest AI tooling on an extremely limited budget? Is the only choice to pay for the "max" plans? Or just read so much about it that you bs your way through an interview and then use the company's resources? Simon, I'm curious too how much you invest each month researching all the latest and great AI tech?

>Starting from zero today, how would someone quickly get upto speed with the latest and greatest AI tooling on an extremely limited budget?

Z.AI, Moonshot.AI, Xiaomi, Minimax, Alibaba all have coding plans that allows a massive usage of GLM 5.1, Kimi k2.6, Minimax M2.7, Qwen 3.6 Plus, Xiaomi MiMo v2.5 Pro for cheap.

Pair those coding plans with the harness of choice including Claude Code and you are good to go.

Also, Nvidia is offering free access to top models for free through NIM - but you have 40 RPM limits. https://blog.kilo.ai/p/nvidia-nim-kilo-code-free-kimi-k25

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#327

Post by [deleted] »

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #309
walthamstow wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can look like that in certain conditions. The question is why are you so eager to give critique on unrelated work, appearing in a demo screencap, to someone who didn't produce it?

I don't know what you're talking about. His tool wraps Claude and breaks the TUI. What's so hard to understand? That's valid critique. What world have I woke up in today?

[deleted]

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#328

Post by [deleted] »

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #309
walthamstow wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can look like that in certain conditions. The question is why are you so eager to give critique on unrelated work, appearing in a demo screencap, to someone who didn't produce it?

I don't know what you're talking about. His tool wraps Claude and breaks the TUI. What's so hard to understand? That's valid critique. What world have I woke up in today?

[deleted]

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#330

Post by ReptileMan »

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.

Anecdata of 1 but it is real. At the end of last year they passed some invisible threshold and became useful. I don't think it is models themselves, but mostly the much more powerful harnesses and I guess their tool calling abilities.

What changed I think was the context harvesting capability of the models. What most programmers did was - debugging and figuring out how something works were the time consuming part - the fix was usually trivial. And now models could do in seconds what took a developer hour or more.

If right now we create a smart grep that just takes everything for a piece of code and outlaw llm-s we will not regress to the previous level. The developers needed this context as much as llm-s to do their job.

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