←back to thread

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: 0s | source
Show context
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).

replies(3): >>46184840 #>>46185379 #>>46185476 #
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.
replies(16): >>46185404 #>>46185408 #>>46185442 #>>46185473 #>>46185478 #>>46185791 #>>46185885 #>>46185911 #>>46186086 #>>46186326 #>>46186420 #>>46186759 #>>46187004 #>>46187058 #>>46187235 #>>46188771 #
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).

replies(7): >>46185592 #>>46185822 #>>46186708 #>>46187030 #>>46187456 #>>46188840 #>>46191020 #
moron4hire ◴[08 Dec 25 01:58 UTC] No.46187456[source]▶
No, the thing needing proof is the novel idea: that LLMs can produce original code.
replies(3): >>46187777 #>>46188015 #>>46194023 #
1. marcus_holmes ◴[08 Dec 25 02:50 UTC] No.46187777[source]▶
LLMs can definitely produce original other stuff: ask it to create an original poem and on an extremely specific niche subject and it will do so. You can specify the niche subject to the point where it is incredibly unlikely that there is a poem on that subject in its training data, and it will still produce an original poem on that subject [0]. The well-known "otter using wifi on a plane" series of images [1] is another example: this is not in the training data (well, it is now, because well-known, but you get the idea).

Is there something unique about code, that is different from language (or images), that would make it impossible for an LLM to produce original code? I don't believe so, but I'm willing to be convinced.

I think this switches the burden of proof: we know LLMs can produce original content in other contexts. Why would they not be able to create original code?

[0] Ever curious, I tested this assumption. I got Claude to write an original limerick about goats oiling their beards with olive oil, which was the first reasonable thing I could think of as a suitably niche subject. I googled the result and could not find anything close to it. I then asked it to produce another limerick on the same subject, and it produced a different limerick, so obviously not just repeating training data.

[1] https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/the-recent-history-of-ai-in...

replies(1): >>46189117 #
2. jacquesm ◴[08 Dec 25 06:35 UTC] No.46189117[source]▶
No, it transformed your prompt. Another person giving it the same prompt will get the same result when starting from the same state. f('your prompt here') is a transformation of your prompt based on hidden state.
replies(1): >>46190854 #
3. marcus_holmes ◴[08 Dec 25 10:52 UTC] No.46190854[source]▶
This is also true of humans, see every debate on free will ever.

The trick, of course, is getting to the exact same starting state.