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Comment by nly | Hacker News Reader

I have a source file of a few hundred lines implementing an algorithm that no LLM I've tried (and I've tried them all) is able to replicate, or even suggest, when prompted with the problem. Even with many follow up prompts and hints.

The implementations that come out are buggy or just plain broken

The problem is a relatively simple one, and the algorithm uses a few clever tricks. The implementation is subtle...but nonetheless it exists in both open and closed source projects.

LLMs can replace a lot of CRUD apps and skeleton code, tooling, scripting, infra setup etc, but when it comes to the hard stuff they still suck.

Give me a whiteboard and a fellow engineer anyday

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I'm seeing the same thing with my own little app that implements several new heuristics for functionality and optimisation over a classic algorithm in this domain. I came up with the improvements by implementing the older algorithm and just... being a human and spending time with the problem.

The improvements become evident from the nature of the problem in the physical world. I can see why a purely text-based intelligence could not have derived them from the specs, and I haven't been able to coax them out of LLMs with any amount of prodding and persuasion. They reason about the problem in some abstract space detached from reality; they're brilliant savants in that sense, but you can't teach a blind person what the colour red feels like to see.

Well I think that’s kind of the point or value in these tools. Let the AI do the tedious stuff saving your energy for the hard stuff. At least that’s how I use them, just save me from all the typing and tedium. I’d rather describe something like auth0 integration to an LLM than do it all myself. Same goes for like the typical list of records, clock one, view the details and then a list of related records and all the operations that go with that. Like it’s so boring let the LLM do that stuff for you.

This is one of my favourite activites with LLMs as well. After implementing some sort of idea for an algorithm, I try seeing what an LLM would come up with. I hint it as well and push it in the correct direction with many iterations but never tell the most ideal one. And as a matter of fact they can never reach the quality I did with my initial implementation.

> but when it comes to the hard stuff they still suck.

Also much of the really annoying, time consuming stuff, like frontend code. Writing UIs is not rocket science, but hard in a bad way and LLMs are not helping much there.

Plus, while they are _very_ good at finding common issues and gotchas quickly that are documented online (say you use some kind of library that you're not familiar with in a slightly wrong way, or you have a version conflict that causes an issue), they are near useless when debugging slightly deeper issues and just waste a ton of time.

There's very low chance this is possible. If you can share the problem, I'm 90% sure an LLM can come up with a non buggy implementation.

Its easy to claim this and just walk away. But better for overall discussion to provide the example.

Great point. The thing is that most code we write is not elegant implementations of algorithms, but mostly glue or CRUDs. So LLMs can still broadly be useful.

i bet i could replicate it if you showed me the source file

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