frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Ask HN: LLM is useless without explicit prompt

4•revskill•1y ago
After months playing with LLM models, here's my observation:

- LLM is basically useless without explicit intent in your prompt.

- LLM failed to correct itself. If it generated bullshits, it's an inifinite loop of generating more bullshits.

The question is, without explicit prompt, could LLM leverage all the best practices to provide maintainable code without me instruct it at least ?

Comments

ben_w•1y ago
Your expectations are way too high.

> - LLM is basically useless without explicit intent in your prompt.

You can say the same about every dev I've worked with, including myself. This is literally why humans have meetings rather than all of us diving in to whatever we're self-motivated to do.

What does differ is time-scales of the feedback loop with the management:

Humans meetings are daily to weekly.

According to recent research*, the state-of-the-art models are only 50% accurate at tasks that would take a human expert an hour, or 80% accurate at tasks that would take a human expert 10 minutes.

Even if the currently observed trend of increasing time horizons holds, we're 21 months from having an AI where every other daily standup is "ugh, no, you got it wrong", and just over 5 years from them being able to manage a 2-week sprint with an 80% chance of success (in the absence of continuous feedback).

Even that isn't really enough for them to properly "leverage all the best practices to provide maintainable code", as archiecture and maintainability are longer horizon tasks than 2-week sprints.

* https://youtu.be/evSFeqTZdqs?si=QIzIjB6hotJ0FgHm

revskill•1y ago
It's not as high as you think.

LLM failed at the most basic things related to maintainable code. Its code is basicaly a hackery mess without any structure at all.

It's my expectation is that, at least, some kind of maintainable code is generated from what's it's learnt.

ben_w•1y ago
Given your expectation:

> It's my expectation is that, at least, some kind of maintainable code is generated from what's it's learnt.

And your observation:

> LLM failed at the most basic things related to maintainable code. Its code is basicaly a hackery mess without any structure at all.

QED, *your expectations* are way too high.

They can't do that yet.

Playing with Blocks

https://hitogata.neocities.org/Blocks
1•surprisetalk•1m ago•0 comments

Recursive Self-Improvement Is Our Only Hope

https://aispring.substack.com/p/recursive-self-improvement-is-our
1•jballanc•1m ago•0 comments

Cybersecurity Incident at Albert Heijn

https://nltimes.nl/2026/10/12/cybersecurity-incident-hack-may-behind-outage-albert-heijn
1•debarshri•2m ago•0 comments

Decentralizing Hugging Face and open model distribution

https://github.com/pirateface/pirateface_hub
1•headless_ai•2m ago•0 comments

VersaTiles Style v6 released with a new API and look-alikes themes

https://mastodon.social/@VersaTiles/117428565971827571
1•karussell•2m ago•0 comments

French supermarkets suffer fridge shutdown after 'unprecedented' cyberattack

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/french-supermarket-chains-cyberattack-forced-115141288.html
1•thinkcontext•4m ago•0 comments

Wikis that use source-control for their backing store (2017)

https://paulhammant.com/2017/09/23/wikis-that-use-source-control-for-their-backing-store/
1•bariumbitmap•5m ago•0 comments

AI's Supercharging a Scam Economy Bigger Than the Cocaine Trade

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-ai-supercharges-scam-economy/
1•thm•6m ago•0 comments

Anne Carson Was in Iceland Listening to the Wind When the Nobel Prize Called

https://theliteraryreporter.com/anne-carson-iceland-listening-to-wind-when-nobel-prize-called/
1•mooreds•10m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Llamachord – a Suzuki Omnichord simulator in the browser

https://llamachord.com/
1•klolol•10m ago•1 comments

Amazon has over 1M robot workers. What's next for human employees?

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/10/inside-amazons-robotic-arms-race-and-what-it-means-for-the-fut...
2•pjmlp•15m ago•1 comments

Sqlthon – A lightweight Pythonic layer for SQLite

https://github.com/saums-1391/sqlthon
1•SAUMS•15m ago•0 comments

Elon Musk emerges as the top booster for Republicans with $276M donations

https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/12/politics/elon-musk-midterm-spending-276-million
7•rawgabbit•15m ago•0 comments

Show HN: How to beat Pac-Man with a text classifier

https://jeffyclassify.com/blog/pacman/
1•nico•15m ago•0 comments

People are rejoicing about the removal of Russian bots from social media

https://www.the-independent.com/tech/bots-russia-x-facebook-meta-bluesky-twitter-b3065172.html
7•tantalor•17m ago•0 comments

In-car display of surrounding environment in AVs

2•ajahso4•18m ago•0 comments

Mathematicians Just Proved How to Prevent AI Brain Rot [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgXTPRWuWa4
2•ptrhvns•18m ago•0 comments

Migrating to OpenCode 2.0

https://opencode.ai/v2/docs/migrate-v1/
2•ilreb•18m ago•1 comments

Free and Open-Source Facebook Scraper – Lightweight, No Headless Browser

3•mhloo•20m ago•0 comments

How to Select an Experiment

https://chillphysicsenjoyer.substack.com/p/how-to-select-an-experiment
2•surprisetalk•21m ago•0 comments

Data: The First 50 Years

https://history.columnar.tech
2•ianmcook•21m ago•1 comments

Dexterity is the Frontier: Thoughts on IROS 2026

https://itcanthink.substack.com/p/dexterity-is-the-frontier-thoughts
2•gmays•22m ago•0 comments

Can Ease of Creation Lead to Decrease in Quality and Value?

https://pikuma.com/blog/ease-creation-decrease-quality-value
3•atan2•22m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Mastro – Turn the browser session into a CLI for any web app

https://github.com/mastro-hq/mastro-connect
2•giulioco•23m ago•0 comments

Veda Launches First Agentic Hobby OS with Built‑in AI Agent

https://www.saasrise.com/news/veda-launches-first-agentic-hobby-os-with-builtin-ai-agent-349d0eeb...
3•vahmoh25•24m ago•0 comments

Sound Blaster: The Card That Owned PC Audio, Then Disappeared [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuQC9e34SsM
3•dkobia•24m ago•0 comments

Show HN: c15t, The open standard for cookie banners

https://c15t.com
1•burnedchris•24m ago•0 comments

AI provider pricing updates – 2026-10-12

https://finopsweekly.com/news/ai-economics-provider-updates-2026-10-09/
1•victorinfinops•24m ago•0 comments

Kevin Kelly's 2016 AI Predictions, 10 Years Later

https://taylor.town/kk-ai-2026
2•surprisetalk•24m ago•0 comments

The Tragedy of AI Coding

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/10/ai-programming-big-tech-regulations/688960/
1•bariumbitmap•24m ago•0 comments