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PHP warns it plans to release 2 emergency patches imminently

https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/10/php-maintainers-tell-web-devs-to-prepare-themselves-for-...
1•jaredwiener•8m ago•1 comments

Giving AI video some Remembrance of things past

https://www.unite.ai/giving-ai-video-some-remembrance-of-things-past/
1•50kIters•9m ago•0 comments

Pragtical v3.14 Lua-based text editor adds menus, floating views, and sessions

https://pragtical.dev/blog/pragtical-v3140-release
1•rd07•9m ago•0 comments

MagicRoute: Routing Without Physical Routers

https://tailscale.com/blog/magicroute-beta
1•mfrw•13m ago•0 comments

World Classics: Modern Translations of the Iliad and Odyssey (EN, FR, DE, ES)

https://worldclassics.org/
1•epsteingpt•15m ago•1 comments

What Will Be Scarce

https://aleximas.substack.com/p/what-will-be-scarce
1•thewileyone•15m ago•0 comments

Omarchy made me rethink my Mac

https://cloudjourneyblog.rohi-lab.org/blog/summon-os
1•RohiRik•19m ago•1 comments

Static vs. dynamic tradeoffs – Rich Hickey (Clojure/Conj 2026) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5eO7BNyJao
1•fmjrey•21m ago•1 comments

Claude Opus 5.5 finished Baldur's Gate 3 on its own in 39 hours

https://bogdantruta.com/blog/claude-finished-baldurs-gate-3/
2•swyx•22m ago•1 comments

Kvleak:my Claude Code cache hit was 95%,fifth of input spend leaked

https://github.com/shangliy/kvleak
1•shangliy•25m ago•0 comments

Android 17 for RISC-V Available for the RVA23 Profile Through Rise

https://riseproject.dev/2026/10/20/android-17-available-on-rva23-with-rise/
1•fork-bomber•27m ago•0 comments

What They're Not Telling You About Data Centers [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1V_o8tfuGdw
1•jonbaer•27m ago•0 comments

C vs. C#: racing VLC's Gaussian blur

https://martinfinkel.com/blog/gaussian-blur-c-vs-csharp/
1•martz•30m ago•0 comments

Why We Still Need an IDE

https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2026/10/20/why-we-still-need-an-ide/
2•snafu109•30m ago•0 comments

AI Benchmarks: Climbing the Wrong Hills

https://research.contrary.com/report/ai-benchmarks-climbing-the-wrong-hills
3•gmays•32m ago•0 comments

SaaS Is Dead

https://saasisdead.si/
3•tokozedginidze•35m ago•1 comments

'Phenomenal sighting': Beluga whale spotted off Donegal

https://www.rte.ie/news/ulster/2026/1020/1596169-beluga-whale-donegal/
1•austinallegro•37m ago•0 comments

Letter to a worried student (David Madore)

http://www.madore.org/~david/weblog/d.2026-10-20.2862.letter-to-a-worried-student.html#d.2026-10-...
2•baruchel•38m ago•0 comments

Delivery Robots Accused of Scanning Customers' Faces and Sharing Biometric Data

https://apnews.com/article/chicago-food-delivery-robots-biometric-data-lawsuits-16ead54eb7dc7c6ea...
2•armcat•40m ago•0 comments

TotalBodyIQ, an iOS workout planner that assumes your week will go wrong

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/totalbodyiq-workout-coach/id6760733953
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What should I use instead of Firefox on Android?

2•trystrawberries•50m ago•1 comments

The Flying Pig Problems

https://tianyin.github.io/flying_pig_problems.html
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Design files are becoming text

https://polotno.com/blog/json-design-format
1•Interfaces_pro•55m ago•0 comments

Larry Ellison Went on Borrowing Spree to Bankroll His Son's Warner Bros. Bid

https://www.wsj.com/finance/larry-ellison-warner-bros-loans-49918714
4•JumpCrisscross•56m ago•0 comments

Don't Be Hapless

https://www.paulgraham.com/relres.html
1•nvader•56m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Does anyone else just want to disconnect from everything?

3•lualover•59m ago•1 comments

Alibaba hikes DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 output prices by 230%

https://www.stork.ai/newsletter/2026-10-20-alibaba-quietly-tripled-deepseek-prices#lead
12•GloVin•1h ago•9 comments

Legacy of Technology Bubbles

https://medium.com/@smoking2man/legacy-of-technology-bubbles-from-dot-coms-to-web-2-0-b7c97bcfe908
3•Aldus551•1h ago•0 comments

ChatGPT Bulk Delete

https://chatgptbulkdelete.net/
3•vinghunter•1h ago•0 comments

Quantum error correction goes well beyond breakeven

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/10/quantum-error-correction-goes-well-beyond-breakeven/
2•pveierland•1h ago•0 comments
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.