frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Ask HN: LLM is useless without explicit prompt

4•revskill•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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.

Valthree: Strongly consistent, distributed, Valkey-compatible database

https://github.com/antithesishq/valthree
1•mastabadtomm•2m ago•0 comments

Forecasted seed valuations for 80 top AI researchers if they started a company

https://futuresearch.ai/most-valuable-researchers/
4•Bullhorn9268•6m ago•0 comments

Forgejo v15.0 Is Available

https://forgejo.org/2026-04-release-v15-0/
1•nickexyz•7m ago•0 comments

Dwarkesh Patel / Jensen Huang – TPU competition, why we should sell chips to Chi

https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/jensen-huang
3•Poleris•7m ago•0 comments

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic Coding Power, Now Open to All

https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.6-35b-a3b
4•cmitsakis•8m ago•0 comments

kpod-metrics: eBPF-based pod-level kernel metrics collector for Kubernetes

https://github.com/pjs7678/kpod-metrics
1•tanelpoder•10m ago•0 comments

Dice-Sørensen Coefficient

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dice-S%C3%B8rensen_coefficient
1•tosh•11m ago•0 comments

The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Where Do We Go from Here?

https://aphyr.com/posts/420-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess-where-do-we-go-from-here
6•aphyr•12m ago•0 comments

Collected some Jujutsu Shenanigans moveset codes (easy to copy)

https://jjsbuilder.com/
1•richardharmer•13m ago•1 comments

The Internet's Most Powerful Archiving Tool Is in Peril

https://www.wired.com/story/the-internets-most-powerful-archiving-tool-is-in-mortal-peril/
2•mellosouls•14m ago•1 comments

BrowserPod 2.0: in-browser WebAssembly sandboxes. Run Git, bash, node, Python

https://labs.leaningtech.com/blog/browserpod-20
3•apignotti•15m ago•2 comments

Venus's impenetrable haze could be made of cosmic dust

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01212-5
2•Brajeshwar•15m ago•0 comments

Replication Internals: Decoding the MySQL Binary Log – How DML Are Replicated?

https://readyset.io/blog/replication-internals-decoding-the-mysql-binary-log-part-8-row-events-wr...
2•marceloaltmann•16m ago•0 comments

Buddy – Anthropic killed /buddy. We made it permanent, cross-platform, and alive

https://github.com/fiorastudio/buddy
3•fiorastudio_jwu•22m ago•3 comments

Parkinson's

https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/parkinsons
2•ingve•22m ago•0 comments

Cloudflare Email Service: now in public beta. Ready for your agents

https://blog.cloudflare.com/email-for-agents/
4•jilles•22m ago•0 comments

Securing AI Applications from Inception to Deployment

https://www.wiz.io/blog/securing-ai-application-from-inception-to-deployment
1•riantz•24m ago•0 comments

Why Drupal Needs Its Own Create-React-App – Meet the One-Line Installer

https://kokocinski.me/blog/why-drupal-needs-its-own-create-react-app-meet-one-line-installer
1•firflant•24m ago•0 comments

Projected warming will exceed the long-term thermal limits of rice cultivation

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-03108-0
1•littlexsparkee•25m ago•1 comments

GPU Breach: A Root Shell Through GPU Abuse

https://stealthium.io/blog/gpubreach-root-cause-analysis-detection
2•hank2000•27m ago•1 comments

Why Combinator? Abolish Silicon Valley

https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-540-why-155766803
2•ornel•27m ago•0 comments

Cloudflare's AI Platform: an inference layer designed for agents

https://blog.cloudflare.com/ai-platform/
8•nikitoci•27m ago•2 comments

Our formal methods tool can be a company – because of AI

https://quint.sh/posts/new_era
1•bugarela•27m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Lobste.rs

1•dryadin•29m ago•0 comments

The public sours on AI, data centers as firms look to IPO, tech keeps spending

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/15/public-opinion-ai-data-centers-anthropic-openai-ipo.html
2•1vuio0pswjnm7•30m ago•0 comments

How Not to Make an App That Only Has 1% Shot at Turning Profit?

https://www.atraction.io/
2•TirmanCica•30m ago•3 comments

ECB to Scrutinize Anthropic's Mythos on Call with Executives

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-16/ecb-to-scrutinize-anthropic-s-mythos-on-call-w...
1•Brajeshwar•30m ago•0 comments

CCBE has adopted the CCBE technical guide on GenAI [pdf]

https://www.ccbe.eu/fileadmin/speciality_distribution/public/documents/IT_LAW/ITL_Guides_recommen...
2•District5524•31m ago•1 comments

Konductor Workflow – The AI Orchestration Agent Framework for Every Dev

https://alphabits.team/news/blog/konductor-workflow-release-the-ai-agent-framework-we-built-for-o...
2•kentnguyen•32m ago•1 comments

The Skills That Matter Now

https://jasonrobert.dev/blog/2026-04-10-the-skills-that-matter-now/
1•hulksmash5756•32m ago•0 comments