2025: The year in LLMs

[Simon Willison]

Simon Willison has become an expert in LLMs, their technical capabilities, and how they’re transforming software development in particular. So his end-of-year roundup is a must-read if you want to understand the space.

For what it’s worth, I agree with him here:

“The most impactful event of 2025 happened in February, with the quiet release of Claude Code.”

It has the potential to transform all of tech. I also think we’re going to see a real split in the tech industry (and everywhere code is written) between people who are outcome-driven and are excited to get to the part where they can test their work with users faster, and people who are process-driven and get their meaning from the engineering itself and are upset about having that taken away. (This is not to say that there aren’t many issues with AI aside from these things, of course.)

It wouldn’t surprise me to see more artisanal teams, startups, and small businesses spring up to give that second set a home. But I think we’ll also see more startups and projects created by the first set, too.

It really is a different way of writing software:

“Claude Code for web is what I call an asynchronous coding agent—a system you can prompt and forget, and it will work away on the problem and file a Pull Request once it’s done.

[…] I love the asynchronous coding agent category. They’re a great answer to the security challenges of running arbitrary code execution on a personal laptop and it’s really fun being able to fire off multiple tasks at once—often from my phone—and get decent results a few minutes later.”

There’s a lot more here besides. If you want to get up to speed, or see what you missed, it’s a great place to start.

[Link]