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Ask HN: What are you working on (March 2026)

1•ludovicianul•22s ago•0 comments

Show HN: I Built Systems AGI – 1600 Verticals, Self-Healing, Self-Evolving

1•Apinok1985•57s ago•0 comments

Building vs Digging

https://bgthread.github.io/an-identity-crisis-in-engineering/
1•tewr•2m ago•0 comments

CPU Cache Flushing Fallacy (2013)

https://mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com/2013/02/cpu-cache-flushing-fallacy.html
1•tosh•3m ago•0 comments

Time to First Success

https://www.leadinginproduct.com/p/time-to-first-success-ttfs
1•benkan•3m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: How do you verify crypto payments in your app?

1•Sem_pre•6m ago•0 comments

Stop Asking Junior Engineers to Struggle Harder

https://jotter.jonathankingston.co.uk/blog/2026/03/03/stop-asking-junior-engineers-to-struggle-ha...
1•kingstonTime•6m ago•0 comments

An Open Letter on the Office.js Stability, Security and Trust Crisis

https://github.com/OfficeDev/office-js/issues/6513
1•mjsu•6m ago•0 comments

Americans now listen to podcasts more often than talk radio, study shows

https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/25/americans-now-listen-to-podcasts-more-often-than-talk-radio-stu...
1•JeanKage•7m ago•0 comments

Sphere Packing in Lean

https://github.com/math-inc/Sphere-Packing-Lean
1•nill0•8m ago•0 comments

LLMs are living off the moral and intellectual capital of a pre-AI world

https://twitter.com/mbrendan1/status/2028137693583221065
2•MrBuddyCasino•8m ago•0 comments

Zolotarev's Magical Proof of Quadratic Reciprocity

https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.00278
1•mathgenius•10m ago•0 comments

*Lisp

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*Lisp
1•tosh•10m ago•0 comments

Show HN: U2m.io – Free URL shortener with bulk API, QR codes, and geo analytics

https://u2m.io/
1•cosmicmeta•13m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: How to report a vulnerability when AI answers the company email?

1•nickgreg•18m ago•0 comments

Cheating machine or powerful assistant? The AI anxieties of a trainee teacher

https://www.theguardian.com/education/ng-interactive/2026/mar/03/cheating-machine-or-powerful-ass...
1•robaato•18m ago•0 comments

Wild claims about K performance

https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/implementation/kclaims.html#instruction-cache
2•tosh•26m ago•0 comments

Drinking newer groundwater linked to up to 62% higher Parkinson's risk

https://www.newsweek.com/one-type-of-drinking-water-linked-to-up-to-62-higher-parkinsons-risk-116...
1•giuliomagnifico•27m ago•0 comments

What is OpenAI going to do when the truth comes out?

https://www.platformer.news/openai-pentagon-surveillance-drones-backlash/
3•mentalgear•30m ago•1 comments

With the Pixel 11, Google needs to admit it has a hardware problem

https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-hardware-problem-3643891/
2•thunderbong•32m ago•0 comments

AI DevOps Engineer Will Eventually Need to Call a Human

https://www.indiehackers.com/post/your-ai-devops-engineer-will-eventually-need-to-call-a-human-Fj...
2•Thimmy3222•45m ago•1 comments

A Message to Devs at the Frontier

https://jackcamerano.com/blog/a-message-to-devs-at-the-frontier/
1•OccamsMirror•46m ago•0 comments

ChinaForNoobs.com – Founder's Guide to Shenzhen

https://www.chinafornoobs.com
3•helloplanets•48m ago•0 comments

Meeting Cost Calculator

https://meetingcostcalculator.ca/
2•Aloha•48m ago•0 comments

Launching raw MVPs with live feature roadmaps – RawLaunch.app

1•fojia•49m ago•0 comments

A Day in the Life of an Enshittificator [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ
3•benkan•51m ago•0 comments

The Death of Spotify: Why Streaming Is Minutes Away from Being Obsolete

https://joelgouveia.substack.com/p/the-death-of-spotify-why-streaming
2•benkan•54m ago•0 comments

ClipMason–Clipboard manager for macOS with built-in text,image,and color actions

http://reviblog.net/apps/clipmason-en/
1•edurevilla•55m ago•2 comments

Apple Introduces iPhone 17e

1•benkan•56m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Does debating between using AI and just writing code slow you down?

1•noduerme•56m ago•0 comments
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.