frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Ask HN: LLM is useless without explicit prompt

4•revskill•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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.

Open Source Alternatives to Cloudflare Products

https://oneuptime.com/blog/post/2026-01-16-decentralize-the-internet-cloudflare-alternatives/view
1•ndhandala•1m ago•0 comments

Medium Was Built for an Internet That No Longer Exists

https://medium.com/@gp2030/medium-was-built-for-an-internet-that-no-longer-exists-ae06bf7ef461
1•light_triad•1m ago•0 comments

MTV Rewind – Want Your MTV? A Rogue Site Is Bringing Back the Videos

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/14/arts/music/mtv-rewind-video-database.html
1•ChrisArchitect•1m ago•1 comments

Cloudflare Just Bought a Web Framework. Here's Why That Changes Everything

https://jpcaparas.medium.com/cloudflare-just-bought-a-web-framework-heres-why-that-changes-everyt...
1•zenoware•3m ago•0 comments

IcoGenie – AI SVG Custom Icon Generator, React Ready

https://icogenie.vercel.app/en
1•albertnahas•3m ago•1 comments

Bandcamp bans AI-generated music: 'Human creativity first'

https://ra.co/news/84314
1•saucymew•4m ago•0 comments

Open-Weight Models Are Getting Serious: GLM 4.7 vs. MiniMax M2.1

https://blog.kilo.ai/p/open-weight-models-are-getting-serious
1•kristianp•4m ago•0 comments

Bare-metal i386 Gopher server for Linux

https://github.com/someodd/gasm
1•midzer•5m ago•0 comments

Interlingua

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua
1•veqq•9m ago•0 comments

Universal SSL exposes domains to BGP leaks

https://community.cloudflare.com/t/universal-ssl-exposes-domains-to-bgp-leaks-re-venezuela-analys...
2•8organicbits•9m ago•0 comments

Friday Deploys: Sometimes That Puppy Needs Murdering

https://charity.wtf/2025/12/24/on-friday-deploys-sometimes-that-puppy-needs-murdering-xpost/
2•speckx•10m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Kerns – A Workspace for Deep, Ongoing Research

https://www.kerns.ai/
1•kanodiaayush•10m ago•0 comments

Tehran Friday prayer leader calls for execution of detained protesters

https://www.iranintl.com/en/202601166946
1•ukblewis•14m ago•1 comments

Slop Is Everywhere for Those with Eyes to See

https://www.fromjason.xyz/p/notebook/slop-is-everywhere-for-those-with-eyes-to-see/
5•speckx•15m ago•0 comments

Life in Kyiv right now (non-media view, I live there)

https://www.redshift-observatory.ch/slblog/2026-01.html#life-in-kyiv
2•Max-Ganz-II•15m ago•0 comments

Software's YouTube Moment Is Happening Now

https://www.a16z.news/p/softwares-youtube-moment-is-happening
1•kwar13•17m ago•0 comments

Cutting LLM token Usage by ~80% using REPL driven document analysis

https://yogthos.net/posts/2026-01-16-lattice-mcp.html
2•yogthos•18m ago•0 comments

The All-Star Chinese AI Conversation of 2026

https://www.chinatalk.media/p/the-all-star-chinese-ai-conversation
2•gmays•18m ago•0 comments

Personalized organoid-blastoid platform predicts embryo transfer outcomes

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.09.26343806v1
1•parkaboy•18m ago•0 comments

Information liberation: Challenging the corruptions of information power

https://documents.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/pubs/98il/
1•logicprog•18m ago•0 comments

Is Germany Looking to Put a Backdoor into Arch Linux?

https://twitter.com/LundukeJournal/status/2011874676750823882
4•DonnyV•19m ago•2 comments

Show HN: Fast handwritten LaTeX symbol recognition (Rust/WASM)

https://wtex.jmrpeck.com/
2•captures•22m ago•1 comments

ChatGPT Go, now available worldwide

https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-go/
2•tosh•25m ago•1 comments

Writes in DuckDB-Iceberg

https://duckdb.org/2025/11/28/iceberg-writes-in-duckdb
1•tosh•26m ago•0 comments

The DC-ROMA II is the fastest RISC-V laptop and is odd

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/dc-roma-ii-fastest-risc-v-laptop-and-odd/
2•EvgeniyZh•28m ago•0 comments

A year in the life of a Staff Engineer

https://medium.com/@_davidanderson/a-year-in-the-life-of-a-staff-engineer-84ae9f6963c1
4•kidbomb•32m ago•0 comments

DuckDuckGo is asking for a Yes or No vote on AI

https://duckduckgo.com/vote
9•jaredcwhite•36m ago•6 comments

Cheap Ornament and Status Games

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/cheap-ornament-and-status-games/
1•judicious•37m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Contribute to GitHub Anonymously

https://github.com/livrasand/gitGost
3•livrasand•40m ago•4 comments

Smalloc: A Simple Memory Allocator

https://github.com/zooko/smalloc
1•todsacerdoti•40m ago•0 comments