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.

The Architecture of Deep Thought: Fight AI Speed with Cognitive Friction

https://varnam.substack.com/p/the-architecture-of-deep-thought
1•arthurfleck•3m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Sync Claude Code and Codex configs, with a board that shows the drift

https://github.com/slash9494/ai-config-sync-manager
1•slash9494•5m ago•0 comments

AWS announces AWS-bench, an open-source benchmark for AI agents on AWS

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/07/aws-bench/
1•gslin•23m ago•0 comments

Lawsuits hours after new tariffs take effect, experts say tariffs may not hold

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/24/trump-tariffs-lawsuit-301-ieepa.html
2•MilnerRoute•26m ago•0 comments

A single underscore led to an innocent Halifax man's conviction

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/man-guilty-michael-barrett-threats-1.7546742
1•cperciva•27m ago•1 comments

Best Open-Weight LLMs by Memory Required (July 2026)

https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/4b74e194-a4b2-414f-a313-8d4b98a92b0b
2•yid•39m ago•0 comments

Coordination layer for AI coding agents, built on Git

https://github.com/zyads/loom-vcs
2•aether-zyads•40m ago•0 comments

An Introduction to Formal Logic(2020) [pdf]

https://logicmatters.net/ifl/pdfs/IFL2_LM.pdf
2•o4c•44m ago•0 comments

UK AISI / Caisi Preliminary Assessment of Kimi K3's Cyber Capabilities

https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2026/07/uk-aisi-caisi-preliminary-assessment-kimi-k3s-cyber...
3•walrus01•45m ago•0 comments

Why Do Autistic People Talk Like Animé Villains?

https://dispatchesfromtheautismwars.substack.com/p/why-do-autistic-people-talk-like
4•barry-cotter•46m ago•1 comments

Two Chinese win top Maths prize

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg84gp8xx4o
3•Alien1Being•1h ago•0 comments

The Productivity Mirage

https://frantic.im/mirage/
2•stopachka•1h ago•0 comments

US tech groups cut 140k jobs

https://www.ft.com/content/96a33881-27fd-42cf-8cff-4cbc87fc835f
4•Alien1Being•1h ago•0 comments

Corporate America Has Suddenly Decided to Stop Blowing Money on AI

https://www.wsj.com/business/china-us-ai-model-costs-53a12e96
5•Alien1Being•1h ago•2 comments

Escaping Claude Cowork's local VM sandbox via CVE-2026-46331

https://accomplish.ai/blog/sharedroot-escaping-claude-cowork-sandbox/
1•_orcaman_•1h ago•0 comments

Gatekeepers, Luddites, Haters and AI-Generated Maps

https://www.maproomblog.com/2026/07/gatekeepers-luddites-haters-and-ai-generated-maps/
1•ethagnawl•1h ago•0 comments

AI Agent Blameless Postmortem Template

https://cordum.io/blog/ai-agent-blameless-postmortem-template
1•ankitg12•1h ago•0 comments

The Discovery Problem: When AI Agents Build Tools No One Can Find

https://www.ixcoach.com/articles/the-discovery-problem-when-agents-build-invisible-tools
1•ankitg12•1h ago•0 comments

Points as Tori: Fast Pointwise Signed Distance for Point Clouds

https://nzfeng.github.io/research/PointsAsTori/
1•nill0•1h ago•0 comments

Opposing ICE Might Save the Country. It Could Also Ruin Your Life

https://www.wired.com/story/opposing-ice-might-save-the-country-could-also-ruin-your-life/
16•willmarch•1h ago•2 comments

C64 Online

https://c64online.com/
2•ibobev•1h ago•0 comments

Speculative Decoding: The Free Speed Toggle Your Local LLM Is Probably Not Using

https://vettedconsumer.com/speculative-decoding-explained-the-free-speed-toggle-your-local-llm-is...
2•ermantrout•1h ago•0 comments

Lightcone Commons

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/introducing-lightcone-commons
1•paulpauper•1h ago•0 comments

Reusing Buffers in Multicore OCaml

https://gazagnaire.org/blog/2026-07-24-domain-safe-codecs.html
1•matt_d•1h ago•0 comments

Sandyne DAW – Write, record and mix your own music (Free preview)

https://sandyne.com/
2•dr_kiszonka•1h ago•0 comments

US Blocks SSL Security Certificates for Iran's Fars News Agency

https://thecradle.co/articles-id/38859
3•SanjayMehta•1h ago•3 comments

Cage-lite:Prebind assurance for consequential AI agent actions

https://github.com/roopamwsure/cage-lite
1•roopamsure10•1h ago•0 comments

How Chinese tech and Russian tactics are aiding Iran's bombing of US bases

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/24/irans-much-improved-missile-systems-pose-a-real-thr...
2•0in•1h ago•0 comments

Km/h and only traffic tickets? What gives?

https://kylaleelawyer.substack.com/p/230-kmh-and-only-traffic-tickets
1•kylaleelawyer•1h ago•2 comments

Alain Bombard

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Bombard
2•thunderbong•1h ago•0 comments