by bangaroo | 2025-10-14 15:38:57+00:00
so to clarify your case, you are having it generate a new application, from scratch, and then benchmarking the quality of the output and how fast it got to the solution you were seeking?

i will concede that in this arena, there does seem to be meaningful improvement.

i said this in one of my comments in this thread, but the place i routinely see the most improvement in output from LLMs (and find they perform best) for code generation is in green field projects, particularly ones whose development starts with an agent. some facts that make me side-eye this result (not yours in particular, just any benchmark that follows this model):

- the codebase, as long as a single agent and model are working on it, is probably suited to that model's biases and thus implicitly easier for it to work in and "understand."

- the codebase is likely relatively contained and simple.

- the codebase probably doesn't cross domains or require specialized knowledge of services or APIs that aren't already well-documented on the internet or weren't built by the tool.

these are definitely assumptions, but i'm fairly confident in their accuracy.

one of the key issues i've had approaching these agents is that all my "start with an LLM and continue" projects actually start incredibly impressively! i was pretty astounded even on the first version of claude code - i had claude building a service, web management interface AND react native app, in concert, to build an entire end to end application. it was great! early iteration was fast, particularly in the "mess around and find out what happens" phase of development.

where it collapsed, however, was when the codebase got really big, and when i started getting very opinionated about outcomes. my claude.md file grew and grew and seemed to enforce less and less behavior, and claude became less and less likely to successfully refactor or reuse code. this also tracks with my general understanding of what an LLM may be good or bad at - it can only hold so much context, and only as textual examples, not very effectively as concepts or mental models. this ultimately limits its ability to reason about complex architecture. it rapidly became faster for me to just make the changes i envisioned, and then claude became more of a refactoring tool that i very narrowly applied when i was too lazy to do the text wrangling myself.

i do believe that for rapid prototyping - particularly the case of "product manager trying to experiment and figure out some UX" - these tools will likely be invaluable, if they can remain cost effective.

the idea that i can use this, regularly, in the world of "things i do in my day-to-day job" seems a lot more far fetched, and i don't feel like the models have gotten meaningfully better at accomplishing those tasks. there's one notable exception of "explaining focused areas of the code", or as a turbo-charged grep that finds the area in the codebase where a given thing happens. i'd say that the roughly 60-70% success rate i see in those tasks is still a massive time savings to me because it focuses me on the right thing and my brain can fill in the rest of the gaps by reading the code. still, i wouldn't say its track record is phenomenal, nor do i feel like the progress has been particularly quick. it's been small, incremental improvements over a long period of time.

i don't doubt you've seen an improvement in this case (which is, as you admit, a benchmark) but it seems like LLMs keep performing better on benchmarks but that result isn't, as far as i can see, translating into improved performance on the day-to-day of building things or accomplishing real-world tasks. specifically in the case of GPT5, where this started, i have heard very little if any feedback on what it's better at that doesn't amount to "some things that i don't do." it is perfectly reasonable to respond to me that GPT5 is a unique flop, and other model iterations aren't as bad, in that case. i accept this is one specific product from one specific company - but i personally don't feel like i'm seeing meaningful evidence to support that assertion.