About whether ChatGPT helps with hard coding problems or just invents nonexistent APIs.
Has this happened?
Yes 67 (54%)Not sure 23 (19%)No 34 (27%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether ChatGPT helps with hard coding problems or just invents nonexistent APIs.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
That makes sense, LLM training data probably has tons of common problems in it, but maybe only a few or no instances of really niche, difficult ones. So it just comes up with a bunch of garbage.
My experience has been similar, it is amazing for stuff I am a beginner at but kinda useless for my actual work. It was invaluable today when I was trying to grasp CA zoning laws, but its almost useless for coding.
This also points to why it will never (imo) be "intelligent". It will never be able to take all its knowledge and use that to solve a problem it doesn't have training data for.