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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

#501

Post by [deleted] »

kstenerud wrote: post #495
sjagauanbdvva wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you won’t listen to a word anyone says lol. You had a visual bug right at the top of the repos README. Then insisted you hadn’t noticed it before. Whats important is not that specific visual bug, it’s what that bug says about the rest of the code. How can we believe that this code is high quality if we see a glaring issue 5 seconds into opening the github? We didn’t seek out your repo and start lobbing critiq…

> you won’t listen to a word anyone says Really? So the discussion leading to the theory that there's likely a problem with termcaps disparity between layers didn't happen? > Whats important is not that specific visual bug, it’s what that bug says about the rest of the code. Really? So you can tell from a single cosmetic bug which doesn't affect its ability to perform its task, that the rest of the codebase is defici…

[deleted]

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#502

Post by epolanski »

hollowturtle wrote: post #462
epolanski wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've quoted you two tools (Ghostty and Redis) whose development now regularly uses AI assistance to deliver production code. I quoted those because their authors shared their experiences, the strengths and the limits of the tooling. There's many more, from Flask to Docker, from Ruby to FastAPI or Tanstack. LLVM has integrated AI-generated PRs, so did Swift and Mojo. Sasha Levin has pushed into Linux Nvidia-related ke…

You cited mostly web tech, which proves my point ;) Is antirez uses extensively agents to contribute to redis doesn't mean it's a becoming industry trend. I'd say quite the contrary, it isn't in the gaming industry for example, where novel ideas matter. And btw Antirez and Linus for example, put a lot of effort into steering agent into doing the right thing for them which is totally different than "these tools become…

Half the projects I listed are system's programming related.

In general you do seem to be unaware of the trend.

And I want to stress it out: I'm not stoked for the trend or changes, but I'm not blind either.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#503

Post by kenjackson »

freedomben wrote: post #460
kstenerud wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You consider adding in-place constructed items to an array to be code duplication?

I've noticed that the bar for "quality" when people judge AI is often significantly higher than what they'd hold a human to. I'm not saying GP et al are doing this (I haven't looked myself), but it is a widespread pattern I've noticed both professionally and personally. I don't know why it is.

I have seen it too. The answer is easy - they don’t like AI. I've seen similar things with some people that don’t like women in tech or certain minorities - they suddenly critique at an extremely high level. I also haven’t looked at this particular case, but it wouldn’t surprise me to be the same thing here.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#504

Post by knollimar »

embedding-shape wrote: post #493
knollimar wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they also hold their hammer wrong when their TUI flickers for months?

That's just poor engineering, product building and testing, same can happen with/without LLMs, no doubt.

If the company making hammers can't hold it right, it suggests something about the hammers, no?

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#505

Post by psadauskas »

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…

I first started noticing they were actually useful around Dec 2025, through about February. I got pretty good at using them, and was amazed at their utility, especially Claude and Codex. Then sometime in March, they got really frustratingly dumb. Things that they used to get right in one shot suddenly took several tried, and I had to watch them like a hawk because they constantly made stupid mistakes, not following instructions that previously worked. I had one try to fix a failing test like this:

    assert_eq x, true if x == true
Both Claude and Codex, both with the latest versions and the original versions that had been working.

Now I just use deepseek. It isn't any dumber, and it costs way less.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#506

Post by oooyay »

kstenerud wrote: post #389
SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two possibilities here: 1) This tool breaks the Claude TUI. Exactly as described by the comment. 2) The Claude TUI itself is broken. The comment is wrong, but assuming the "billion dollar TUI product" is capable of basic rendering and it's the wrapper that broke it, that is an entirely reasonable assumption The fun here is that both of these softwares were made extensively using AI. No matter which of our o…

The issue is likely that the tmux session being generated is for some reason not propagating all term caps. Most likely it's an interop issue between tmux and docker and the image running under docker - possibly even something with the terminal client that the pipeline doesn't like somewhere. Claude Code correctly reduces its display to 7-bit ASCII in response (still functional, although less pretty). Once I get arou…

What's really interesting in this comment chain is an observation I've expressed a lot more lately. When someone knows an LLM was involved they raise their expectations. I do it too in my own work and I have to remind myself things like "this bug would've also likely occurred with a human working at this level of complexity." The real question is did the operator arbitrarily and knowingly increase the level of complexity or is it appropriate for the task.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#507

Post by hollowturtle »

epolanski wrote: post #502
hollowturtle wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cited mostly web tech, which proves my point ;) Is antirez uses extensively agents to contribute to redis doesn't mean it's a becoming industry trend. I'd say quite the contrary, it isn't in the gaming industry for example, where novel ideas matter. And btw Antirez and Linus for example, put a lot of effort into steering agent into doing the right thing for them which is totally different than "these tools become…

Half the projects I listed are system's programming related. In general you do seem to be unaware of the trend. And I want to stress it out: I'm not stoked for the trend or changes, but I'm not blind either.

> Half the projects I listed are system's programming related.

No they're not and those who are, are in overwhelming control by the engineers that steer continuously the agents in the right direction. First of all this isn't something you can do for novel ideas, especially in gaming, second it is indeed very bad the code they produce otherwise it won't require that much effort from high end professionals to bend the LLMs to their will.

Denial of nothing, it's pretty clear from my original comment above that gen ai is indeed deployed with varying degree of success in various stuff. My point is there wasn't any "inflection point" just a better integration between agents and os tools all inside a loop.

I successfully use AI in my day to day job, just not that much for coding, if I have a sense a task can be one-shotted by Claude I do, if not I don't. Simple as that

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#508

Post by hollowturtle »

chasd00 wrote: post #477
hollowturtle wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cited mostly web tech, which proves my point ;) Is antirez uses extensively agents to contribute to redis doesn't mean it's a becoming industry trend. I'd say quite the contrary, it isn't in the gaming industry for example, where novel ideas matter. And btw Antirez and Linus for example, put a lot of effort into steering agent into doing the right thing for them which is totally different than "these tools become…

GenAI is very much being used in the gaming industry, maybe its just you.

proof? except for marketing? There's a GDC anonymous poll that underlines very low percentages of usage

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#509

Post by sroussey »

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…

Long term, it can be better to slowly refactor parts of your code base into the way the model expects it to be. Sometimes fighting the gradient of code’s uniqueness vs expectation is not worth it.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#510

Post by TurkTurkleton »

kenjackson wrote: post #503
freedomben wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed that the bar for "quality" when people judge AI is often significantly higher than what they'd hold a human to. I'm not saying GP et al are doing this (I haven't looked myself), but it is a widespread pattern I've noticed both professionally and personally. I don't know why it is.

I have seen it too. The answer is easy - they don’t like AI. I've seen similar things with some people that don’t like women in tech or certain minorities - they suddenly critique at an extremely high level. I also haven’t looked at this particular case, but it wouldn’t surprise me to be the same thing here.

Dude, are you for real? We've had the supposed inevitability of AI rammed down our throats since the minute LaMDA convinced Blake Lemoine it was sentient, we've watched CEOs hype up AI as if it were production-ready while it was still barely beta quality, LLM-driven chatbots have been stapled to the side of every product no matter how little sense it makes since OpenAI published an API, and we've been told to prepare for the inevitable "agentic future" even as Claude 3.5 had to have its hand held more than a wet-behind-the-ears freshman summer intern. We're told that this technology is going to eat the entire world economy and render human labor obsolete, starting with our jobs, but if it's genuinely supposed to do that, I think it's more than reasonable to expect it to write superhumanly perfect code, not just code that's incrementally better than the last model release but still bad; extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, after all. To liken AI skepticism to the obstacles faced by women and minorities in tech is a category error that trivializes actual human struggles against human prejudices.
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