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.

HyWiki: Zero Markup Hypertext

https://www.chiply.dev/post-hyperbole-hywiki
1•engfan•37s ago•1 comments

A bug which affected only left handed users

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/07/a-bug-which-only-affected-left-handed-users/
1•sixhobbits•1m ago•0 comments

AI agents accessing production database

1•Eapz_06•1m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Kettio – using ML to assume audience buying

https://kettio.com
1•smerrill2•2m ago•1 comments

Apple loses challenges against EU rules to curb Big Tech

https://www.reuters.com/world/eu-court-rejects-apples-challenge-against-eu-rules-reining-big-tech...
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•2m ago•0 comments

Self-generated hydrogel ejects bacterial cells for localized biofilm dispersion

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-026-02413-4
1•bookofjoe•3m ago•0 comments

Cloudflare Meerkat - Globally distributed consensus

https://blog.cloudflare.com/meerkat-introduction/
1•bobnamob•3m ago•0 comments

Before Sputnik: The Mystery Lights That Refuse to Die

https://www.liberationtimes.com/home/before-sputnik-the-mystery-lights-that-refuse-to-die
1•nsavage•3m ago•0 comments

Eternal Terminal v7.0.0

https://github.com/MisterTea/EternalTerminal/releases/tag/et-v7.0.0
1•darcien•6m ago•1 comments

CSS is simple, stop making it hard

https://blog.brixit.nl/css-is-simple-stop-making-it-hard/
1•surprisetalk•6m ago•0 comments

A Heterogeneous System-on-Chip with an 83 GFLOp/s, 1.2 TFLOp/s/W

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11523040
1•rbanffy•7m ago•0 comments

Seven Studies on Letting LLMs Edit Trees

https://www.lightningjar.com/blog/stable-ids-are-all-you-need
1•kevinpeckham•10m ago•0 comments

Tiny data centre used to heat public swimming pool

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64939558
6•breitling•11m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Pug.sh – open-source product analytics

https://pug.sh/
3•BajajScooter•14m ago•0 comments

Should we stop using the word "Responsive" for design?

https://www.andreaverlicchi.eu/blog/should-we-stop-using-the-word-responsive-for-design/
1•speckx•15m ago•0 comments

Dopamine is about wanting, not liking

https://theneuroreview.com/posts/dopamine-doesnt-do-what-you-think.html
2•CameronKade•15m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Pennen, a handwriting-only journal for iPad and Apple Pencil

https://pennen.ir.studio/
1•IshaanRawat•15m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Tab-da, a keyboard-first Chrome extension for people with too many tabs

https://www.thirdculture.app/tab-da/
1•bardi•16m ago•0 comments

Schema-Driven Development

https://schema-driven.dev/
2•dneighman•16m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Why aren't we collaborating on the prompts we give to our AI agents?

1•ilbert•16m ago•0 comments

Knockoff: A browser extension that filters pseudo-brand junk out of Amazon

https://github.com/Shpigford/knockoff
1•gaws•16m ago•0 comments

I had 25 AI agents try to kill 25 startup ideas. They killed 22

https://thatsbuddy.com/blog/kill-test
2•billyholevas•17m ago•0 comments

Can You See the Line That Decides What You May Read and Say?

https://thephilodev.substack.com/p/can-you-see-the-line-that-decides
1•philo_dev•18m ago•0 comments

'Fish of a Lifetime'

https://www.postregister.com/news/local/fish-of-a-lifetime-a-10-minute-fight-a-30-5-inch-super-ra...
1•mooreds•19m ago•0 comments

Why Is This Empty MySQL Table Taking 20 Seconds to Query?

https://devgeist.com/blog/ghost-in-the-database/
1•VMyroslav•20m ago•0 comments

We chased a hallucinated quote through 30k records and found our own prompt

https://www.interhuman.ai/blog/goblin-yeah-friday-at-five
1•filipsardjoski•20m ago•0 comments

Text Art Tools

https://hlnet.notion.site/text-art-tools
1•surprisetalk•20m ago•0 comments

Show HN: AIfunc – Call AI as a function, not as an agent

https://github.com/aifunc-dev/aifunc/
1•GildenEye•20m ago•0 comments

FrontierCode 1.1

https://cognition.com/blog/frontier-code-1.1
1•Topfi•21m ago•0 comments

Brown Professor Suspects Majority of His Class Used AI to Cheat

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/learning-assessment/2026/07/08/brown-professor-suspec...
2•cdrnsf•21m ago•0 comments