I remember when we just wanted to rewrite everything in Rust.
Those were the simpler times, when crypto bros seemed like the worst venture capitalism could conjure.
...and the best of them all, OpenCode[1] :)
[1]: https://opencode.ai
I like to believe, but MCP is quickly turning into an enterprise thing so I think it will stick around for good.
At least when herding cats, you can be sure that if the cats are hungry, they will try to get where the food is.
Here is the changelog for OpenBSD 7.8:
https://www.openbsd.org/78.html
There's nothing here that says: We make it easier to use it more of it. It's about using it better and fixing underlying problems.
Mistakes and hallucinations matter a whole lot less if a reasoning LLM can try the code, see that it doesn't work and fix the problem.
Does it? It's all prompt manipulation. Shell script are powerful yes, but not really huge improvement over having a shell (REPL interface) to the system. And even then a lot of programs just use syscalls or wrapper libraries.
> can try the code, see that it doesn't work and fix the problem.
Can you really say that does happens reliably?
If you mean 100% correct all of the time then no.
If you mean correct often enough that you can expect it to be a productive assistant that helps solve all sorts of problems faster than you could solve them without it, and which makes mistakes infrequently enough that you waste less time fixing them than you would doing everything by yourself then yes, it's plenty reliable enough now.
Its very difficult to argue the point that claude code:
1) was a paradigm shift in terms of functionality, despite, to be fair, at best, incremental improvements in the underlying models.
2) The results are an order of magnitude, I estimate, better in terms of output.
I think its very fair to distill “AI progress 2025” to: you can get better results (up to a point; better than raw output anyway; scaling to multiple agents has not worked) without better models with clever tools and loops. (…and video/image slop infests everything :p).
My point is purely that, compared to 2024, the quality of the code produced by LLM inference agent systems is better.
To say that 2025 was a nothing burger is objectively incorrect.
Will it scale? Is it good enough to use professionally? Is this like self driving cars where the best they ever get is stuck with an odd shaped traffic cone? Is it actually more productive?
Who knows?
Im just saying… LLM coding in 2024 sucked. 2025 was a big year.
It’s also possible that people more experienced, knowledgable and skilled than you can see fundamental flaws in using LLMs for software engineering that you cannot. I am not including myself in that category.
I’m personally honestly undecided. I’ve been coding for over 30 years and know something like 25 languages. I’ve taught programming to postgrad level, and built prototype AI systems that foreshadowed LLMs, I’ve written everything from embedded systems to enterprise, web, mainframes, real time, physics simulation and research software. I would consider myself an 7/10 or 8/10 coder.
A lot of folks I know are better coders. To put my experience into context: one guy in my year at uni wrote one of the world’s most famous crypto systems; another wrote large portions of some of the most successful games of the last few decades. So I’ve grown up surrounded by geniuses, basically, and whilst I’ve been lectured by true greats I’m humble enough to recognise I don’t bleed code like they do. I’m just a dabbler. But it irks me that a lot of folks using AI profess it’s the future but don’t really know anything about coding compared to these folks. Not to be a Luddite - they are the first people to adopt new languages and techniques, but they also are super sceptical about anything that smells remotely like bullshit.
One of the most wise insights in coding is the aphorism“beware the enthusiasm of the recently converted.” And I see that so much with AI. I’ve seen it with compilers, with IDEs, paradigms, and languages.
I’ve been experimenting a lot with AI, and I’ve found it fantastic for comprehending poor code written by others. I’ve also found it great for bouncing ideas. And the code it writes, beyond boiler plate, is hot garbage. It doesn’t properly reason, it can’t design architecture, it can’t write code that is comprehensible to other programmers, and treating it as a “black box to be manipulated by AI” just leads to dead ends that can’t be escaped, terrible decisions that will take huge amounts of expert coding time to undo, subtle bugs that AI can’t fix and are super hard to spot, and often you can’t understand their code enough to fix them, and security nightmares.
Testing is insufficient for good code. Humans write code in a way that is designed for general correctness. AI does not, at least not yet.
I do think these problems can be solved. I think we probably need automated reasoning systems, or else vastly improved LLMs that border on automated reasoning much like humans do. Could be a year. Could be a decade. But right now these tools don’t work well. Great for vibe coding, prototyping, analysis, review, bouncing ideas.
they were right
Invariably they've never used AI, or at most very rarely. (If they used AI beyond that, this would be admission that it was useful at some level).
Therefore it's reasonable to assume that you are in that boat. Now that might not be true in your case, who knows, but it's definitely true on average.
Different strokes, but I’m getting so much more done and mostly enjoying it. Can’t wait to see what 2026 holds!
Anyone that believes that they are completely useless is just as deluded as anyone that believes they're going to bring an AGI utopia next week.
2024 was a lot of talk, a lot of "AI could hypothetically do this and that". 2025 was the year where it genuinely started to enter people's workflows. Not everything we've been told would happen has happened (I still make my own presentations and write my own emails) but coding agents certainly have!
This is me touting for Emacs
Emacs was a great plus for me over the last year. The integration with various tooling with comint (REPL integration), compile (build or report tools), TUI (through eat or ansi-term), gave me a unified experience through the buffer paradigm of emacs. Using the same set of commands boosted my editing process and the easy addition of new commands make it easy to fit my development workflow to the editor.
This is how easy it is to write a non-vague "tool X helped me" and I'm not even an English native speaker.
I will never stop treating hallucinations as inventions. I dare you to stop me. i double dog dare y
On this including AI agents deleting home folders, I was able to run agents in Firejail by isolating vscode (Most of my agents are vscode based ones, like Kilo Code).
I wrote a little guide on how I did it https://softwareengineeringstandard.com/2025/12/15/ai-agents...
Took a bit of tweaking, vscode crashing a bunch of times with not being able to read its config files, but I got there in the end. Now it can only write to my projects folder. All of my projects are backed up in git.
Will 2026 fare better?
The big labs are (mostly) investing a lot of resources into reducing the chance their models will trigger self-harm and AI psychosis and suchlike. See the GPT-4o retirement (and resulting backlash) for an example of that.
But the number of users is exploding too. If they make things 5x less likely to happen but sign up 10x more people it won't be good on that front.
But that one doesn't make headlines ;)
What I find interesting with chat bots is that they're "web apps" so to speak, but with safety engineering aspects that type of developer is typically not exposed to or familiar with.
I have to think 3 years from now we will be having the same conversation about robots doing real physical labor.
"This is the worst they will ever be" feels more apt.
That’s what most non-tech-person’s year in LLMs looked like.
Hopefully 2026 will be the year where companies realize that implementing intrusive chatbots can’t make better ::waving hands:: ya know… UX or whatever.
For some reason, they think its helpful to distractingly pop up chat windows on their site because their customers need textual kindergarten handholding to … I don’t know… find the ideal pocket comb for their unique pocket/hair situation, or had an unlikely question about that aerosol pan release spray that a chatbot could actually answer. Well, my dog also thinks she’s helping me by attacking the vacuum when I’m trying to clean. Both ideas are equally valid.
And spending a bazillion dollars implementing it doesn’t mean your customers won’t hate it. And forcing your customers into pathways they hate because of your sunk costs mindset means it will never stop costing you more money than it makes.
I just hope companies start being honest with themselves about whether or not these things are good, bad, or absolutely abysmal for the customer experience and cut their losses when it makes sense.
Companies have been doing this "live support" nonsense far longer than LLMs have been popular.
Add to this that all the hardware is already old and the amount of waste we’re producing right now is mind boggling, and for what, fun tools for the use of one?
I don’t live in the US, but the amount of tax money being siphoned to a few tech bros should have heads rolling and I really don’t want to see it happening in Europe.
But I guess we got a new version number on a few models and some blown up benchmarks so that’s good, oh and of course the svg images we will never use for anything.
I literally said:
"AI data centers continue to burn vast amounts of energy and the arms race to build them continues to accelerate in a way that feels unsustainable."
AND I linked to my coverage from last year, which is still true today (hence why I felt no need to update it): https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31/llms-in-2024/#the-envi...
But LLM is certainly a game changer, I can see it delivering impact bigger than the internet itself. Both require a lot of investments.
AndyNemmity•2h ago
tkgally•47m ago
I look forward to learning from his blog posts and HN comments in the year ahead, too.