frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Ask HN: LLM is useless without explicit prompt

4•revskill•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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.

Show HN: AgentBox – SDK to Run Claude Code, Codex, or OpenCode in Any Sandbox

https://github.com/TwillAI/agentbox-sdk
1•willydouhard•7s ago•0 comments

Sort by Controversial (2018)

https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
1•cwillu•19s ago•0 comments

AI and Teaching – The Brave New World

https://steveblank.com/2026/04/22/ai-and-teaching-the-brave-new-world/
1•Brajeshwar•1m ago•0 comments

Amal Khalil and the Lie We Keep Repeating

https://substack.com/home/post/p-195191174
1•__yak•1m ago•0 comments

Show HN: AI Square Face Avatar Generator and Classic Flash Pixel Icon Generator

https://www.squarefacegenerator.ai
1•hashkitly•2m ago•0 comments

Apps and programming: two accidental tyrannies

https://andymatuschak.org/tat/
1•sebg•2m ago•0 comments

Big O for MySQL: Why the Same Query Gets Slow at Scale

https://anotherboringtechblog.com/2026/04/big-o-for-mysql/
2•tanelpoder•3m ago•0 comments

Dear Codebase: A Letter from Your Coding Agent

https://mroczek.dev/articles/dear-codebase-letter-from-agent/
1•lackoftactics•3m ago•0 comments

White House accuses China of 'industrial scale' theft of AI technology

https://www.reuters.com/world/white-house-accuses-china-industrial-scale-theft-ai-technology-ft-r...
1•nickthegreek•5m ago•1 comments

Muon Experiment Eliminates Fifth Force, Confirms Standard Model

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/physicists-think-theyve-solved-the-muon-mystery/
1•dan-bailey•5m ago•0 comments

Name in Landsat

https://science.nasa.gov/specials/your-name-in-landsat/
1•luispa•5m ago•0 comments

Audio transcription is worse in 2026 than it was in 2016

https://write.as/shantnu/audio-transcription-is-worse-in-2026-than-it-was-in-2016
1•shantnutiwari•6m ago•0 comments

Making beautiful work is getting harder

https://slowlywilliam.com/2026/04/21/why-everything-is-terrible.html
2•quicklywilliam•7m ago•1 comments

AuraCode – An AI Agent tool to visualize and chat with messy codebases

https://www.auracode.space/
1•TaraW1•8m ago•0 comments

Dioxus – Fullstack app framework for web, desktop, and mobile in Rust

https://github.com/dioxuslabs/dioxus
1•modinfo•9m ago•0 comments

Show HN: JSBT – binary serialization for real JavaScript object graphs

https://github.com/cheprasov/ts-jsbt
1•cheprasov•9m ago•0 comments

Bitwarden Statement on Checkmarx Supply Chain Incident

https://community.bitwarden.com/t/bitwarden-statement-on-checkmarx-supply-chain-incident/96127
3•Wingy•9m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Uvx skill-mgr install -t Claude -t codex

https://github.com/AI-Colleagues/skill-mgr
1•NeuralNotwork•9m ago•0 comments

macOS Desktop app v0.0.1 Preview Release "bot with a budget" idea

https://github.com/DialtoneApp/macos-app
1•fcpguru•9m ago•1 comments

IP Networking in Deep Space

https://blog.apnic.net/2026/04/16/podcast-ip-networking-in-deep-space/
1•wesleyeddy•9m ago•0 comments

To Protect and Swerve: NYPD Cop Has 547 Speeding Tickets

https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2026/04/23/to-protect-and-swerve-nypd-cop-has-527-speeding-tickets-ye...
2•greedo•10m ago•0 comments

Building with teams in two continents is hard. Here's what I learnt

https://thefoundersdraft.substack.com/p/everyone-tells-you-to-build-global
3•manishfp•11m ago•0 comments

Researchers Simulated a Delusional User to Test Chatbot Safety

https://www.404media.co/delusion-using-chatgpt-gemini-claude-grok-safety-ai-psychosis-study/
1•pkilgore•13m ago•0 comments

Decoupled DiLoCo: Resilient, Distributed AI Training at Scale

https://deepmind.google/blog/decoupled-diloco/
3•salkahfi•17m ago•0 comments

Show HN: LocalLLM – Recipes for Running the Local LLM (Need Contributors)

https://locallllm.fly.dev
2•Igor_Wiwi•18m ago•1 comments

A Comprehensive Guide to Model Routing for Coding Agents

https://www.notdiamond.ai/blog/a-comprehensive-guide-to-model-routing
1•t5-notdiamond•18m ago•0 comments

Show HN: When Your Repo Moves, Your AI Coding History Doesn't

https://www.apicula.com/blog/when-your-repo-moves-your-ai-history-doesnt/
1•apiculallc•18m ago•0 comments

Aster Mail – End-to-end encrypted email with post-quantum cryptography

https://astermail.org/
1•lucasfin000•18m ago•2 comments

Oldest known recording of a whale song could unlock mysteries of the ocean

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/oldest-known-recording-of-a-whale-song-could-unlock-mysterie...
1•PaulHoule•18m ago•0 comments

Inflated AI claims are under fire–and the regulatory reckoning is coming

https://fortune.com/2026/04/23/ai-washing-securities-litigation-regulatory-era-baker-mckenzie/
2•Brajeshwar•20m ago•0 comments