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.

Show HN: WifeBench – My wife vibes LLM rankings

https://www.wifebench.com/
1•fristovic•1m ago•0 comments

Dermatology is wrong about the sun

https://twitter.com/MattZirwas/status/2050586857868591306
1•bilsbie•3m ago•0 comments

Automate Excel with Python: From manual grind to one-click workflow

https://nostarch.com/automate-excel-with-python
1•teleforce•4m ago•0 comments

Trump pardons 11, most for violating Clean Air Act

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/trump-pardons-11-most-violating-clean-air-act-2026-07-04/
1•Kapura•5m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Isthistechdead.com got a full UI revamp

https://isthistechdead.com/
1•jobehi•7m ago•0 comments

America imports 99% of its fireworks from China

https://justinkuiper.substack.com/p/america-imports-99-of-its-fireworks
3•zdw•10m ago•0 comments

The Structural Failure of Disciplinary Science: What a Machine Found in 2 Hours

https://zenodo.org/records/21198389
1•javieralbuixech•11m ago•0 comments

Heddle

https://heddle.sh/
1•handfuloflight•11m ago•0 comments

Ramp data shows heavy AI adopters hire more

https://econlab.substack.com/p/we-can-finally-say-ai-isnt-killing-jobs
1•skybrian•16m ago•0 comments

Can you train AI to invert AES?

https://www.juanslozano.com/blog/ai-aes
1•juansebastianl•16m ago•0 comments

Counting Until the End of the Universe

https://essenceia.github.io/projects/until_heat_death_do_us_part/
2•random__duck•22m ago•1 comments

ContainerUtility: A macOS app for the container CLI

https://github.com/erdaltoprak/ContainerUtility
2•erdaltoprak•24m ago•0 comments

Living subscription-free in my brain

https://mapwriting.substack.com/p/living-subscription-free-in-my-brain
2•doitLP•25m ago•0 comments

Exploiting LLM Agent Supply Chains via Payload-Less Skills

https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14460
1•_pdp_•27m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Apple Foundation Model in Xcode-Beta

https://gist.github.com/voxels/b6ea737dd127745f9af009ebd038ded4
1•edgcumbe•29m ago•0 comments

Omegacode: Code based orchestration for any coding agent

https://github.com/Sawyerhood/omegacode
1•handfuloflight•33m ago•0 comments

3D Airplane tracker on Mercator map

https://github.com/jamalrfordii-arch/Vanguard-Map
1•Lawyer24•35m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Desunofier – Removing shimmer from Suno songs

https://www.instasong.co/tools/desunofier
1•stanyy•35m ago•0 comments

Invisible Cities: The Legal Analysis of Space Based Solar Power

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6881678&__cf_chl_f_tk=hLQWAnW2Nv4B5PaV4xX16mF...
1•Lawyer24•36m ago•0 comments

GPT-5.5 Codex reasoning-token clustering may be leading to degraded performance

https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/30364
33•maille•37m ago•4 comments

Australian influencer Lily Jay's tangled web of AI manipulation

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-05/lily-jay-foundation-posts-ai-generated-misleading-videos/1...
3•phs318u•38m ago•0 comments

Global scammers use US tech to fleece people

https://apnews.com/article/scams-fraud-technology-ai-impostor-scam-phishing-12f549d5203abd38857c4...
4•jethronethro•40m ago•0 comments

Edeward Neumeier talks about 'RoboCop'

http://www.money-into-light.com/2013/07/edward-neumeier-talks-about-robocop.html
1•firasd•40m ago•0 comments

Taking the Temperature of Black Holes(2019)

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-47773553
1•rolph•44m ago•0 comments

Tea-dash – a gh-dash-style terminal dashboard for Gitea and Forgejo

https://github.com/gbarany/tea-dash
1•gbarany•46m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Markdown to PDF CLI Tool

https://github.com/leonardosalasd/doc-engine-cli
2•leonardosalasd•50m ago•1 comments

My AI-built PHP engine in Rust passes 17% of PHP-src tests, renders WordPress

https://ekinertac.com/blog/i-dont-know-rust-my-ai-is-rewriting-php-in-it/
2•ekinertac•52m ago•0 comments

GoDaddy argues India's fake site crackdown could damage internet

https://www.reuters.com/world/worlds-biggest-domain-seller-fears-indias-fake-site-crackdown-could...
4•1vuio0pswjnm7•56m ago•1 comments

Small, odd, fleeting moments in which a neighborhood briefly exceeds itself

https://www.neighborhood-stills.com/
1•alexandruboia•57m ago•0 comments

The tests are the code now

https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/03/10/the-tests-are-the-code-now
3•softwaredoug•59m ago•0 comments