Following instructions. I've got a modest sized CLAUDE.md containing some simple rules to follow. Things to always do, things to never do. Not a day goes by where Claude Opus violates one or several of the instructions. He keeps making Django multi line template comment bugs. He keeps using -r with ripgrep thinking that means recursive, when actually that's a replacement instruction, he hits that problem several times each day. He sometimes just goes ahead and does a git commit without my approval. All of this is spelled out in CLAUDE.md but he forgets. He apologizes profusely when it happens. Tiring.
Ask HN: What is one simple thing LLMs are insanely bad at?
61–70 of 80 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is one simple thing LLMs are insanely bad at?
#62[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What is one simple thing LLMs are insanely bad at?
#63Following instructions. I've got a modest sized CLAUDE.md containing some simple rules to follow. Things to always do, things to never do. Not a day goes by where Claude Opus violates one or several of the instructions. He keeps making Django multi line template comment bugs. He keeps using -r with ripgrep thinking that means recursive, when actually that's a replacement instruction, he hits that problem several time…
That's a Claude thing btw. Try using a harness which does not inject half a novel of instructions in combination with a different model. I would recommend Pi + GPT 5.6 Luna for a very capable and cheap test.
After using Claude (paid by work) for a couple of months, I was amazed how well instruction following works in other setups.
Re: Ask HN: What is one simple thing LLMs are insanely bad at?
#64They aren't funny. The jokes they come up with are extremely lame and the sort of thing you would expect a company HR manager to tweet. I asked a bot why it thought it wasn't funny once, and it told me it has been trained to avoid being misinterpreted or offensive, so anything that might be considered edgy would have been RLHF'd out of it. I thought this was very introspective.
You can get better results from less aligned models like Kimi K3. Still not actually funny, but at least it’s able to produce some unhinged stuff and I guess shock and twists are kinda related to humor?
Still missing the human connection of cause, so im not sure if this is a technical / skill issue in the first place.
Re: Ask HN: What is one simple thing LLMs are insanely bad at?
#65Removing stuff without mentioning the removal.
Asking an LLM to remove an Idea from a Document often times results in an edit which explicitly states that this Idea is not relevant, instead of just removing all references to that Idea.
That might be useful for some form of "evolving" Documentation (so future readers know that this part of the search space was covered and deemed irrelevant) but is just overly verbose and confusing to read in most situations.
Re: Ask HN: What is one simple thing LLMs are insanely bad at?
#66I'm working on generating slides with our own model, and one thing general LLMs can't do is leave empty space.
Whitespace is the core of design that actually feels good, but they keep trying to add "distinctive design elements," and you end up with that AI-flavored excess everywhere.
They only know how to add. What LLMs seem unusually bad at is taking things away.
Re: Ask HN: What is one simple thing LLMs are insanely bad at?
#67math
Re: Ask HN: What is one simple thing LLMs are insanely bad at?
#68One unexpected discovery that I have made while building an AI-based system: the LLM's are bad at designing prompts. We tend to think that the AI has some sort of self-knowledge and should be good at designing prompts for itself but it's really not. Been struggling with a task that heavily depended on prompts, ended up rewriting all my prompts from scratch in my own words, and it finally worked. Then every time I ask…
Can you share some tips what worked for you?
Re: Ask HN: What is one simple thing LLMs are insanely bad at?
#69Video game tips. Constant mistakes and hallucinations, in my experience. Seen this across a lot of different games. Even in really well documented games, such as OSRS (which has multiple fantastic wikis). Anno 1800 was a recent one I had trouble with, using Claude Opus. Completely made up game mechanics. Rainbow Six Siege, too.
I've experienced this also, sometimes I ask it about WoW stuff, e.g tips for arena or which enchant to get and it makes a lot of mistakes in regards to which spells or enchants are available in which phase or expansion. I guess the source material is quite bad.
Re: Ask HN: What is one simple thing LLMs are insanely bad at?
#70One unexpected discovery that I have made while building an AI-based system: the LLM's are bad at designing prompts. We tend to think that the AI has some sort of self-knowledge and should be good at designing prompts for itself but it's really not. Been struggling with a task that heavily depended on prompts, ended up rewriting all my prompts from scratch in my own words, and it finally worked. Then every time I ask…
Can you share some tips what worked for you?
Generally, facts over instructions. This has been Anthropic's recommendation too, in one of their recent blog posts.
Also the shorter the better, let the model figure out the rest. Overinstruction degrades intelligence. We tend to underestimate their capabilities, we overinstruct them and then complain about them being dumb.