Simon Willison’s annual review of the major trends, breakthroughs, and cultural moments in the large language model ecosystem in 2025, covering reasoning models, coding agents, CLI tools, Chinese open‑weight models, image editing, academic competition wins, and the rise of AI‑enabled browsers.
An analysis of the current LLM landscape in 2026, focusing on the shift from 'vibe coding' to more efficient and controlled workflows for software development and data analysis. The author advocates for tools like AI Studio and OpenCode, and discusses the strengths of models like Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude Sonnet.