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.

Broccoli2Shell: Brotli decoder RCE (CVE-2026-111497) in Node.js, Python and more

https://broccoli2shell.com/
1•theanonymousone•4m ago•0 comments

The Vulnerability Apocalypse and Why We Should Fund Open Source

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/10/vulnerability-apocalypse-and-why-we-should-fund-open-source
1•Brajeshwar•11m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Enzyme – a programming language that compiles wikis for agents

https://github.com/byenzyme/enzyme
4•earllee•11m ago•1 comments

Updated Google privacy policy says your Gmail might be used for advertising

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/10/updated-google-privacy-policy-says-your-gmail-might-be-us...
1•rdmuser•13m ago•0 comments

LongMemEval scores move when the judge can see the sources

https://www.memstrata.dev/
1•yadu989•14m ago•0 comments

Should parents be wary of Silicon Valley's influence in schools?

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2026/10/should-parents-be-wary-of-silicon-valleys-influenc...
1•rdmuser•16m ago•0 comments

Show HN: BakeVideos – Turn ideas into videos with editable scenes

https://bakevideos.com/
1•rishbz•17m ago•0 comments

How to Use Decision Models for Evals

https://hamel.dev/blog/posts/decision-model-evals/
1•theanonymousone•20m ago•0 comments

Why Birds Can Fly over Mount Everest

https://lede-v2.nautil.us/why-birds-can-fly-over-mount-everest-237864
1•andsoitis•23m ago•0 comments

Scientists Are Making Concrete with Human Poop – and It Gets 42% Stronger

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-are-making-concrete-with-human-poop-and-it-gets-42-stronger
2•ghost-pooper•25m ago•0 comments

Space News: Could a Moon crater be a future astronaut base?round

https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/articles/cw7vp75m1vrgo
1•rbanffy•25m ago•0 comments

Bunkering Down

https://interconnected.org/home/2026/10/24/bunker
1•Tomte•27m ago•0 comments

Is AI just another get rich quick scheme?

1•jqpabc123•30m ago•0 comments

X API client and a social-network simulator to test it against

https://github.com/i574n/x
1•i574n•30m ago•0 comments

Meta's Muse Solves CAPTCHAs on Google, Amazon and Cloudflare

https://github.com/sneakers-the-rat/muse-skills/tree/main/topics/bot_challenge
2•mrkn1•31m ago•0 comments

Typed Tibia-rules simulator targeting WGSL for the OT Agent Arena benchmark

https://github.com/i574n/tibia
1•i574n•31m ago•0 comments

Bring arc features to any browser. Here's how.

1•supasidebar•32m ago•0 comments

Show HN: TranscriptClip – Paste TikTok/IG/YouTube, Get Transcript (TXT/SRT/VTT)

https://transcriptclip.com/
1•chaojie26•32m ago•0 comments

Elon Musk Just Gave Europe a Reason to Replace American Technology

https://steveblank.com/2026/10/24/europe-gets-a-wake-up-call/
64•sblank•32m ago•28 comments

Nvidia B300 GPUs on Chinese Networks: 12,000 GPU Study

https://lava.security/blog/nvidia-b300-gpus-china
2•wondersky•32m ago•0 comments

Rental car company accuses man of driving 18,000 miles in 7 days

https://moneywise.com/news/top-stories/avis-accuses-customer-of-driving-18000-miles-in-a-week
2•firesteelrain•33m ago•0 comments

I DO Understand Relativity

https://www.southampton.ac.uk/~doug/relativity/index.html
1•rramadass•35m ago•1 comments

Codes Can Speak

https://zenodo.org/records/23441596
1•Ario_Framework•36m ago•0 comments

Lost Tale: "The Mortal" (1927) by Anonymous

https://deepcuts.blog/2026/10/24/lost-tale-the-mortal-1927-by-anonymous/
1•olvy0•39m ago•0 comments

Origin Range Requests: Serving large files without range-request tuning

https://blog.cloudflare.com/origin-range-requests/
1•khalidkhair•40m ago•0 comments

Android's Source Code as a 3D City (4K) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hLh9LZqel8
1•edward28•40m ago•0 comments

Investigating alignment failures in AISI's incident

https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/investigating-alignment-failures-in-aisis-incident
1•torutofu•41m ago•0 comments

Regulate the deployment, not just the model: a who-does-what plan for AI safety

https://substack.norabble.com/p/ai-safety-is-all-hands-on-deck
2•nedruod•43m ago•0 comments

Hinoki Offensive One, the first open access cyber model

https://hinoki.security/beta
2•cocoflunchy•43m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Word Chain – a word-ladder puzzle where the target word is hidden

https://popawordgame.com/chains/
2•5iron•44m ago•0 comments