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.

New TONTOU CPU attack bypasses Spectre v2 fixes, leaks Linux password hashes

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-tontou-cpu-attack-bypasses-spectre-v2-fixes-le...
1•sbulaev•3m ago•0 comments

Airlines Push Back Against ICE Enforcement at Airports

https://www.wsj.com/business/airlines/airlines-push-back-against-ice-enforcement-at-airports-50a4...
1•petethomas•4m ago•0 comments

Someone Stole $15,000 And Nobody Cared

https://michelesteelenow.substack.com/p/the-mahomes-heist-you-dont-know-about
1•jawns•4m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Compare frontier speech-to-speech models for free

https://voiceduel.com/
2•armaanp23•4m ago•0 comments

Prompt Injection Vulnerability in Ollama, Gemma4 and HuggingFace's Transformers

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1vhivsb/prompt_injection_in_ollama_gemma4_and/
1•pavelai•7m ago•1 comments

The Challenger Launch Decision

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo22781921.html
2•gregsadetsky•7m ago•1 comments

Intuitize – The Thoughtful AI

https://intuitize.pages.dev/
1•telui•9m ago•0 comments

California Man Is Kidnapped Then Executed in Front of Police

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/31/us/kidnapping-shooting-chino-hills.html
3•Michelangelo11•10m ago•0 comments

The energy use of agentic AI

https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/the-real-energy-use-of-agentic-ai
1•alphabetatango•10m ago•0 comments

An Agentic IDE That Builds Itself

https://www.sawyerhood.com/blog/an-agentic-ide-that-builds-itself
5•sawyerjhood•11m ago•0 comments

Attacks your login screen should be terrified of

https://fusionauth.io/lp/10-attacks-mfa
1•mooreds•11m ago•0 comments

The Pentagram Map

https://e-infinity.space/pentagram-map/
1•mathgenius•11m ago•0 comments

Social Media AI Agent That Works over WhatsApp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9TJciv_hxc
1•jflynn2•13m ago•1 comments

0-day security update available for Metabase

https://www.metabase.com/blog/security-update
2•garyhtou•13m ago•0 comments

Show HN: GreatArrow.ai – Shared memory for Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and Cursor

https://www.greatarrow.ai
1•clapptastic•15m ago•0 comments

From Memory to Agency

https://arkalabs.app/from-memory-to-agency
1•Jergrim•17m ago•0 comments

Google repository now has 90 skills

https://github.com/google/skills
2•haebom•17m ago•0 comments

Everyday Technology Is Becoming a Black Box. Is There a Cost?

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/everyday-technology-is-becoming-a-black-box-is-there-a-cost/
1•EA-3167•17m ago•0 comments

Gemma Translator: offline DIY translation device built with Gemma 4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dNry5zP0Jo
1•twobitshifter•18m ago•0 comments

Slopaganda Countermeasures: Part 1

https://docsgoblin.com/blog/26-03-17-slopaganda-countermeasures.html
1•erikhopf•18m ago•0 comments

Spin audit of SQD/QSCI quantum-chemistry benchmarks on iron–sulfur clusters

https://zenodo.org/records/21359923
3•purestatelabs•20m ago•0 comments

Kevin Warsh to stick with lean Fed messaging despite market backlash

https://www.ft.com/content/debe096f-ec89-424f-a8ca-d3843ef53549
1•petethomas•21m ago•0 comments

"I loved every minute of it, however hard it had been" [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GS7CxAtV5Ks
2•jackdoe•28m ago•1 comments

OpenAI's ring-shaped smart speaker will reportedly cost between $300 and $400

https://www.engadget.com/2232108/openai-s-ring-shaped-smart-speaker-will-reportedly-cost-between-...
4•prng2021•30m ago•3 comments

Patient Zero (you can hug faces with cyber arms)

https://lokley.substack.com/p/patient-zero
1•loopscrollgame•31m ago•0 comments

The Schwarzschild Metric: Complete Derivation – General Relativity [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cSYZMM0wU4
1•binyu•34m ago•0 comments

VCS Friendly Scene Diffs in Godot 4.8

https://godotengine.org/article/dev-snapshot-godot-4-8-dev-2/#core-write-object-variants-with-n-b...
1•BinRoo•35m ago•0 comments

Snapline – menu-bar screenshot app that searches shots by their text

https://snap-line.app/
2•ziadeh•36m ago•0 comments

Blasting the Air in Front of Hypersonic Vehicles with Lasers Reduces Drag

https://www.twz.com/33859/blasting-the-air-in-front-of-hypersonic-vehicles-with-lasers-could-unlo...
3•delichon•41m ago•1 comments

How I released a game that has no assets [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qr3VsZYQy4s
1•EspadaV9•44m ago•1 comments