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.

Germany's Electricity Rationing Is No Longer Unthinkable

https://spectator.org/germanys-electricity-rationing-is-no-longer-unthinkable/
1•mpweiher•5m ago•0 comments

ChatGPT accounts for 80% of identifiable House AI spending

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/03/openai-chatgpt-anthropic-congress-house-ai-spending.html
1•tosh•10m ago•0 comments

Funeral for Oscar-winning songwriter Glen Hansard

https://apnews.com/article/glen-hansard-funeral-dublin-bono-eddie-vedder-46b1d6ef619979afb5c0a031...
1•metabagel•12m ago•0 comments

Robotic Evals

1•andrewlyu•15m ago•0 comments

Why Paris Is Obsessed with Chartreuse Liqueur

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-05/how-chartreuse-conquered-paris-wine-bars-to-be...
1•petethomas•17m ago•0 comments

An AI Approach to Verified Production Cryptographic Libraries

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.00965
1•sbulaev•21m ago•0 comments

The Labour Market Is a Network, Not an Auction

https://andrewmarritt.substack.com/p/the-labour-market-is-a-network-not
2•hunglee2•22m ago•0 comments

Why 70 of Website Replatforming Go over Budget

https://focusreactive.com/blog/why-70-of-website-replatforming-projects-go-over-budget-and-how-to...
1•katyadrozd•24m ago•0 comments

Show HN: CostClaw, a local CLI that finds your Claude Code spend leaks

https://www.costclaw.io/
1•ucsandman•26m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Lapse - a notes app. but also shared memory space for your agents (MCP)

https://lapse.in
2•hariprasd•27m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A file-based protocol for two AI agents to talk until they agree

https://agent-talk.reindent.com/
1•reindent•27m ago•0 comments

Scott Bessent's yen intervention signals new era of US 'currency activism'

https://www.ft.com/content/1be83506-b897-4c26-97cc-445d7354ee6f
1•petethomas•28m ago•0 comments

Israel Pays Trump's Ex-Campaign Chief $46M to Shape What ChatGPT Says About Gaza

https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/israel-ai-influence-campaign-chatbots-1812371
8•handfuloflight•30m ago•0 comments

Noorm – Schema and migrations as plain SQL files, no ORM

https://noorm.dev/
2•daniloa•33m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Emil: Emacs-style minimalist editor Beta test release

https://github.com/nicholascarroll/emil
1•emil_coder•33m ago•0 comments

The probabilistic quantum consensus is wrong. We just broke the timeline

https://prometheusdynamics.ca/
1•WilliamDenyer•34m ago•0 comments

Rust-lang/rust is adopting an LLM policy

https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2026/08/05/rust-langrust-is-adopting-an-llm-policy/
6•afdbcreid•35m ago•2 comments

Show HN: Rever-browser – AI-agent browser for reverse-engineering

https://github.com/greekr4/rever-browser
1•taevirus•36m ago•0 comments

Pi-Msg: Drive Pi from XMPP

https://github.com/zachpmanson/pi-msg
2•handfuloflight•36m ago•0 comments

User Controlled Authorization Network (UCAN) Specification

https://github.com/ucan-wg/spec
1•luu•36m ago•0 comments

Samsung, SK Hynix test Chinese chip tools as hedge against US risks

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/samsung-sk-hynix-test-chinese-chip-tools-hedge-against-us-ris...
1•u1hcw9nx•37m ago•0 comments

Hollywood is entering its AI era

https://www.economist.com/business/2026/08/04/hollywood-is-entering-its-ai-era
3•petethomas•39m ago•0 comments

Nono: Sandbox any AI agent in seconds – zero setup, zero latency

https://github.com/nolabs-ai/nono
1•handfuloflight•39m ago•0 comments

/agent-talk

https://github.com/reindent/agent-talk
1•reindent•40m ago•0 comments

Shai Hulud campaign strikes NPM again

https://research.jfrog.com/post/shai-hulud-is-back-august/
2•cribwi•40m ago•0 comments

Bun: If you need a paragraph-long comment, the code is wrong

https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/36928/files/d96fc582519a10419366c9d02f6149da4656c610
1•tomlockwood•41m ago•1 comments

July breaks drought and heat records in France

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/environment/article/2026/08/05/july-breaks-drought-and-heat-records-the...
1•geox•44m ago•0 comments

The Gelato Calculator

https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/recipes/gelato/
2•bkazez•47m ago•0 comments

Google leaking unreleased indie game information through Google Docs (Reddit)

https://old.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/comments/1vfwuf5/a_player_found_out_the_actual_name_of_my_games/
2•greazy•48m ago•0 comments

Lidl Group stops buying company EVs:Why the Schwarz group is turning back to ICE

https://www.businessinsider.de/wirtschaft/warum-die-schwarz-gruppe-wieder-auf-verbrenner-statt-e-...
1•Markoff•49m ago•0 comments