This is not meant as an insult, but have you actually LLM/vibe coded anything that used a fast(-ish) moving library or framework? Try asking your favorite LLM with say Jan 2025 knowledge cutoff (or pretraining data cutoff, whatever you want to call it) to work on something using a framework that had a big rewrite later that year (which would make it one year old now, which is like ages in the LLM coding era)... It's a nightmare full of wrestling with the LLM when you try to tell it the version of the framework and that it changed a lot from the previous version and yadda yadda long story short down the thread when context runs out and/or is compressed it begins to forget detailed instructions and just falls back to pulling out old patterns it "remembers" from pretraining. And so you need to constantly remind it what you work with and "oh hey this doesnt work because we're working with react router v7 in framework mode, remember? not react router v6". Or try to use the latest non-lts/breaking version of a library, at first it looks it up online, but again as you get deeper into the weeds and little details, the struggle begins.

So, as far as I'm concerned, training cutoff is still a big deal.

Until they prefer not to search. Let me explain using the example of the open-source security framework (1) our team is working on.

If you ask Gemini what you should use to integrate fraud prevention or account takeover protection into your product, there will be no mention of our open-source project. Five years in development, 1.3k stars, over 140 pull requests — all this isn't enough to make it into the training data. From this perspective, any technology that emerges after 2024 is simply invisible to LLMs.

The answer is: without being in the training data, LLMs basically don't understand what they're searching for.

1. https://github.com/tirrenotechnologies/tirreno