Simon Willison: the last six months in LLMs in five minutes
Published 2026-05-19Ingested 2026-05-21AI Engineering PracticesMedium
Summary
Simon Willison published a five-minute summary of the November 2025–May 2026 LLM news cycle on May 19 — a practitioner-level retrospective that names the shifts that mattered for working engineers. The list compresses to roughly: Anthropic's Mythos preview and Opus 4.7 (Adaptive) topping coding benchmarks; OpenAI shipping GPT-5.5 and the Deployment Company; Gemini 3.1 Pro then 3.5 Flash; MCP crossing 97M monthly SDK downloads and moving to the Linux Foundation; the Stainless and Karpathy moves a
Alignment: Reinforces current position
Related Positions: AI-Assisted Development Tooling, Multi-Model Multi-Vendor, Agentic Workflows
Related Partnerships: Anthropic Claude, Microsoft GitHub
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