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I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

(j0nah.com)
549 points thecr0w | 3 comments | 07 Dec 25 17:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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thuttinger ◴[07 Dec 25 19:44 UTC] No.46184466[source]▶
Claude/LLMs in general are still pretty bad at the intricate details of layouts and visual things. There are a lot of problems that are easy to get right for a junior web dev but impossible for an LLM. On the other hand, I was able to write a C program that added gamma color profile support to linux compositors that don't support it (in my case Hyprland) within a few minutes! A - for me - seemingly hard task, which would have taken me at least a day or more if I didn't let Claude write the code. With one prompt Claude generated C code that compiled on first try that:

- Read an .icc file from disk

- parsed the file and extracted the VCGT (video card gamma table)

- wrote the VCGT to the video card for a specified display via amdgpu driver APIs

The only thing I had to fix was the ICC parsing, where it would parse header strings in the wrong byte-order (they are big-endian).

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jacquesm ◴[07 Dec 25 21:33 UTC] No.46185379[source]▶
Claude didn't write that code. Someone else did and Claude took that code without credit to the original author(s), adapted it to your use case and then presented it as its own creation to you and you accepted this. If a human did this we probably would have a word for them.
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bsaul ◴[07 Dec 25 21:43 UTC] No.46185478[source]▶
That's an interesting hypothesis : that LLM are fundamentally unable to produce original code.

Do you have papers to back this up ? That was also my reaction when i saw some really crazy accurate comments on some vibe coded piece of code, but i couldn't prove it, and thinking about it now i think my intuition was wrong (ie : LLMs do produce original complex code).

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fpoling ◴[07 Dec 25 22:19 UTC] No.46185822[source]▶
Pick up a book about programming from seventies or eighties that was unlikely to be scanned and feed into LLM. Take a task from it and ask LLM to write a program from it that even a student can solve within 10 minutes. If the problem was not really published before, LLM fails spectacularly.
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crawshaw ◴[07 Dec 25 22:23 UTC] No.46185881[source]▶
This does not appear to be true. Six months ago I created a small programming language. I had LLMs write hundreds of small programs in the language, using the parser, interpreter, and my spec as a guide for the language. The vast majority of these programs were either very close or exactly what I wanted. No prior source existed for the programming language because I created it whole cloth days earlier.
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1. fpoling ◴[07 Dec 25 22:58 UTC] No.46186214{3}[source]▶
Languages with reasonable semantics are rather similar and LLMs are good at detecting that and adapting from other languages.
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2. pertymcpert ◴[08 Dec 25 05:28 UTC] No.46188712[source]▶
Sounds like creativity and intelligence to me.
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3. tatjam ◴[08 Dec 25 14:05 UTC] No.46192341[source]▶
I think the key is that the LLM is having no trouble mapping from one "embedding" of the language to another (the task they are best performers at!), and that appears extremely intelligent to us humans, but certainly is not all there's to intelligence.

But just take a look at how LLMs struggle to handle dynamical, complex systems such as the "vending machine" paper published some time ago. Those kind of tasks, which we humans tend to think of as "less intelligent" than say, converting human language to a C++ implementation, seem to have some kind of higher (or at least, different) complexity than the embedding mapping done by LLMs. Maybe that's what we typically refer to as creativity? And if so, modern LLMs certainly struggle with that!

Quite sci-fi that we have created a "mind" so alien we struggle to even agree on the word to define what it's doing :)