Hacker News: se4u

Ask HN: How do you distinguish prompt issues from model failures in LLMs today

se4u — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:39:24 +0000

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47427959

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by se4u in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)"

se4u — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:33:48 +0000

Building VizPy, a prompt optimizer we've been working on for a while now.

The problem it's solving is one most people building with LLMs know well. Your prompt fails on some inputs, you don't really know why, and you end up just tweaking and re-running until something sticks. We kept hitting this ourselves and it felt like there had to be a better way than guessing.

What we figured out after a lot of research: prompt failures almost always follow a pattern. The model isn't failing randomly, it's consistently failing on a particular type of input or reasoning step. VizPy finds that pattern, distills it into a plain English rule you can actually read, and then rewrites your prompt around it. You also get the rule itself so you can review it, tweak it, or just drop it into your existing prompt directly. DSPy-compatible, no pipeline rewrite needed.

We have compared it extensively against baselines such as GEPA on benchmarks like BBH, HotPotQA, GPQA Diamond, and GDPR-Bench and VizPy wins on all of them. We'll have more benchmarks on cyber-security and chip-design coming out soon.

Free to try, 10 runs no card: https://vizpy.vizops.ai/

New comment by se4u in "We recreated the Anthropic C compiler agent"

se4u — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:15:33 +0000

Anthropic released a C compiler this week that was built autonomously. We mined the entire repo for clues to reproduce the scaffolding they used and open sourced it.

We recreated the Anthropic C compiler agent

se4u — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:15:33 +0000

Article URL: https://vizops.ai/blog/agent-scaling-laws/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46963189

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by se4u in "OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google"

se4u — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 23:15:09 +0000

FYI, It wasn't taken the money and leave, a lot of them got absorbed into GDM.

Source: I was in GDM when character was acquired.

New comment by se4u in "The year I didn't survive"

se4u — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 22:27:35 +0000

+1 to this, my mom died because of COVID in India 1 months after she left US after visiting me, and I still feel guilty that I didnt insist on getting her the vaccine before she left for India, and then at the time of her death India was locked down so no flights and I wasn't even next to her. It's been 4 years but every so often I think about this. I blame myself less now after some therapy, but If you didn't try all that you could you'd probably feel guilty like me.

New comment by se4u in "Citations on the Anthropic API"

se4u — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 04:04:19 +0000

Yeah I don't understand why the whole thread has been so hostile against a very reasonable/useful observation that you made. If there was a way to prompt commenters to be less snarky on HN that'd be a vast improvement.

New comment by se4u in "Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline"

se4u — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 00:26:00 +0000

The brits were also running the opium shops. So if you think country A selling opiods in country B and then going to war so that country B can not stop the sale of opiods is totally okay, then that is truly very different from my model of good behavior.

New comment by se4u in "Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline"

se4u — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 16:39:10 +0000

Have you seen YouTube shorts and Instagram reels. Lol

New comment by se4u in "Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline"

se4u — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 16:37:43 +0000

I don't know if you are just ignorant about history and unwilling to Google, or if you are making the point that of course British did not force feed opium to the people.

What is very well established is that the british fought a war , literally called the opium war by Western historians themselves with the main objective of keeping their opium distribution into China open after the emperor banned it

Their action was akin to if some majority owner of Purdue pharma invades US and forces US government to "keep the oxy market open" while letting "people make their own decision".

New comment by se4u in "I still don't think companies serve you ads based on your microphone"

se4u — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 04:18:52 +0000

The hidden variable is the previa marketing budget. They have budget right now for a billboard and for online ads at the same time and they are focusing on your geography

New comment by se4u in "W Virginia town of Green Bank has become a refuge for 'electrosensitive' people"

se4u — Sat, 19 Oct 2024 18:17:39 +0000

A few months ago I read about a lady who can smell Alzheimer's and at first she too was not taken seriously. I can't think of how RF can affect human body but I wouldn't dismiss their reports completely.

New comment by se4u in "How long til we're all on Ozempic?"

se4u — Sat, 12 Oct 2024 00:59:10 +0000

The real fun will be when there is enough of this chemical in our waste runoff that cattle and wildlife gives up eating

New comment by se4u in "Drug resistant bacteria found on ISS mutating to become functionally distinct"

se4u — Mon, 06 May 2024 07:36:32 +0000

Details are in the actual paper, and its linked prominently but it take a few clicks to get there.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10960378/

There's even a video abstract!

New comment by se4u in "Boeing chief must have engineering background, Emirates boss says"

se4u — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 10:24:50 +0000

I feel this, I also still dont understand RACI , like how can responsibility and accountability be truly separate? It just seems wrong

New comment by se4u in "ArXiv Papers as Audiobooks"

se4u — Fri, 15 Mar 2024 20:38:01 +0000

Many years ago, I did that when I had a large paper reviewing load during my phd. My solution was simply to purchase an app called SayIt for like a dollar that read the pdf to me, worked really well.

Nowadays I often pass the pdf through LLMs to get personalize (expand on jargon or contract the verbiage) and then read them. That gives me a better return on time spent.

New comment by se4u in "Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Without Prompting"

se4u — Sat, 17 Feb 2024 22:31:30 +0000

Fyi, the pinsker inequality bounds KL divergence in terms of Total variation distance and TVD is like infinity norm on the difference between probability distribution, and sum of absolute differences is the L1 norm, and L1 and L_infty are also related.

tl;dr is to not worry about the mathematical details, if it works it works.

New comment by se4u in "A woman who can smell Parkinson's is inspiring research into diagnosis (2020)"

se4u — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 17:45:43 +0000

This discovery (if true) is as improbable and wonderful as luis pasteur and bacteria or fleming and penicilin

New comment by se4u in "Nvidia's Chat with RTX is an AI chatbot that runs locally on your PC"

se4u — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 17:39:39 +0000

You are forgetting about developers who may want to develop on top of something stable and with long term support. That's a big market.

New comment by se4u in "Attack of the Week: Airdrop Tracing"

se4u — Sat, 13 Jan 2024 00:57:58 +0000

If you are an engg in a big company you could just email the relevant mailing list / slack channel. And somebody highly knowledgeable will tell you a lot of what you need to know .