frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Ask HN: LLM is useless without explicit prompt

4•revskill•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo 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 HTML Review 05

https://thehtml.review/05/
1•duck•1m ago•0 comments

Flow Matching and Diffusion Models – 2026 Version

https://diffusion.csail.mit.edu/2026/index.html
1•duck•1m ago•0 comments

Dark Reader – Browser extension that generates dark mode for web pages

https://darkreader.org/
1•Brysonbw•6m ago•0 comments

I built an AI teammate that takes Jira tickets and turns them into PRs

https://github.com/ignify-rd/claude-teammate
1•tuananhdao•12m ago•0 comments

Exponential lower bound for fan-in-2 circuits computing Hamiltonian Cycle

https://zenodo.org/records/19103649
1•jbgallagher0002•13m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Command_line – a fast, terminal-style Hacker News app

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/command-line/id6468368351
1•danimalcrackerz•15m ago•0 comments

A tool to “swallow” outputs from Claude/Codex/Cursor and reuse them

https://github.com/vule022/swallow
1•vukasinrancic•15m ago•1 comments

My Willing Complicity in "Human Rights Abuse"

https://ussri.substack.com/p/my-willing-complicity-in-human-rights
1•barry-cotter•16m ago•0 comments

German Mathematician Gerd Faltings Wins Abel Prize for Number Theory Work

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/science/abel-prize-mathematics.html
1•bookofjoe•17m ago•1 comments

Chest Fridge

https://mtbest.net/chest-fridge/
1•wolfi1•22m ago•1 comments

Argentina was one of the richest countries at the beginning of the 20th century

https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/argentina-was-one-of-the-richest-countries-in-the-world-...
2•kamaraju•29m ago•0 comments

JavaScript Is Enough

https://geajs.com/
3•arbayi•30m ago•1 comments

Lightweight Compression in DuckDB

https://duckdb.org/2022/10/28/lightweight-compression
1•Rendello•31m ago•0 comments

JPMorgan deploys tech to monitor junior bankers' working hours

https://www.ft.com/content/5ee9d5f1-9b9b-4aee-8712-111e873e241a
1•petethomas•36m ago•0 comments

Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

https://writings.hongminhee.org/2026/03/craft-alienation-llm/
2•vinhnx•37m ago•1 comments

Cuba rejects US embassy's 'shameless' request for diesel

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/5794480-us-embassy-cuba-diesel-fuel-iran-conflict/
14•thisislife2•39m ago•1 comments

OS X Stats Nano – Ultra-light macOS menu bar monitor (180 KB)

1•xmao•42m ago•0 comments

Musk found liable to Twitter shareholders in fraud lawsuit over $44B takeover

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/musk-found-liable-twitter-shareho...
4•karp773•48m ago•1 comments

Big HVAC is shaking: Beat the heat with a wet towel and spite for $240B [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siBBCap_Z-s
2•SilentM68•50m ago•0 comments

What Do Coders Do After AI?

https://www.anildash.com/2026/03/13/coders-after-ai/
1•jbegley•50m ago•0 comments

Apple Wanted to Buy Halide to Boost Camera App–Now There's a Lawsuit

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/21/apple-wanted-to-buy-halide-to-boost-iphone-18-pro/
1•CharlesW•51m ago•0 comments

AI and the PhD student: friend or foe?

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00843-y
1•Anon84•53m ago•0 comments

Best Practices for Secure Error Handling in Go

https://blog.jetbrains.com/go/2026/03/02/secure-go-error-handling-best-practices/
1•mroche•53m ago•0 comments

Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/21/profiling-hacker-news-users/
42•simonw•54m ago•41 comments

Google Summer of Code 2026 Is Here: Contribute to Kotlin

https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2026/03/gsoc-2026-contribute-to-kotlin/
3•mroche•58m ago•0 comments

Parallel Seam Carving

https://shwestrick.github.io/2020/07/29/seam-carve.html
2•ChadNauseam•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: Robot Astral Projection

https://tryreflex.ai
3•quantbagel•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: I built a pricing tool for home bakers that reads recipe photos

https://butterwell.io
2•shiyuzhu1994•1h ago•0 comments

Show HN: ClawMem – Open-source agent memory with SOTA local GPU retrieval

https://github.com/yoloshii/ClawMem
3•yoloshii•1h ago•0 comments

OpenAI reportedly plans to double its workforce to 8k employees

https://www.engadget.com/ai/openai-reportedly-plans-to-double-its-workforce-to-8000-employees-161...
6•prng2021•1h ago•0 comments