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Comment by ccvannorman | Hacker News Reader

A great litmus test for AI is to ask it to write a posteffect GLSL shader for a javascript game engine.

They all fail quite spectacularly at this, at least for my use case (cel shading, outlines, height sensitive fog)

My experience was that they're entirely useless for cases where you can't find examples of that kind of code on the web. They just hallucinate APIs that don't exist to solve your problem. I would suspect that GLSL is rare enough, and different enough from other programming languages to pose problems for the LLMs here.

I’m not sure that’s useful - most of HN would fail that too :-).

Or rather, as I honestly don’t know what a GLSL shader is, and barely know what a canvas is, it would be a bit like the scene from blackadder - I would love for Baldrick to read this book, but that will mean teaching him to read, which will take about ten years.

I am not a fanboy of LLMs or genAI but how is this a great test litmus test for their usefulness? How many humans on earth could do that today? Ten thousand at the most?

That’s the point.

I don’t need an “AI” to help me with something widely discussed, I can simply read the docs. On the other hand I’d love a tool that opens me niche topics in a reliable way.

I'm pretty sure you can find GLSL shader + webgl playground and modify it to make bit different one in like 15 minutes.

Then the LLM is not useful here

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