Hacker News Reader

Comment by atilimcetin | Hacker News Reader

Nowadays, I'm working on a realtime path tracer where you need proper understanding of microfacet reflection models, PDFs, (multiple) importance sampling, ReSTIR, etc.. Saying that mine is a somewhat specific use case.

And I use Claude, Gemini, GLM, Qwen to double check my math, my code and to get practical information to make my path tracer more efficient. Claude and Gemini failed me more than a couple of times with wrong, misleading and unnecessary information but on the other hand Qwen always gave me proper, practical and correct information. I’ve almost stopped using Claude and Gemini to not to waste my time anymore.

Claude code may shine developing web applications, backends and simple games but it's definitely not for me. And this is the story of my specific use case.

View on HN

I have said similar things about someone experiencing similar things while writing some OpenGL code (some raytracing etc) that these models have very little understanding and aren't good at anything beyond basic CRUD web apps.

In my own experience, even with web app of medium scale (think Odoo kind of ERP), they are next to useless in understanding and modling domain correctly with very detailed written specs fed in (whole directory with index.md and sub sections and more detailed sections/chapters in separate markdown files with pointers in index.md) and I am not talking open weight models here - I am talking SOTA Claude Opus 4.6 and Gemini 3.1 Pro etc.

But that narrative isn't popular. I see the parallels here with the Crypto and NFT era. That was surely the future and at least my firm pays me in cypto whereas NFTs are used for rewarding bonusess.

Someone exactly said it better here[0] already.

[0]. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47817982

a semester ago i was taking a machine learning exam in uni and the exam tasked us with creating a neural network using only numerical libraries (no pytorch ecc). I'm sure that there are a huge lot of examples looking all the same, but given that we were just students without a lot of prior experience we probably deviated from what it had in its training data, with more naive or weird solutions. Asking gemini 3 to refactor things or in very narrow things to help was ok, but it was quite bad at getting the general context, and spotting bugs, so much that a few times it was easier to grab the book and get the original formula right

otoh, we spotted a wrong formula regarding learning rate on wikipedia and it is now correct :) without gemini and just our intuition of "mhh this formula doesn't seem right", that definitely inflated our ego

To be fair, I've had the extreme misfortune of working on Odoo code and I can understand why an LLM would struggle.

Yearly breaking changes but impossible to know what version any example code you find is related to (except that if you're on the latest version, it's definitely not for your version), closed and locked down forum (after several months of being a paying customer, I couldn't even post a reply, let alone ask a question), weird split between open and closed, weird OWL frontend framework that seems to be a bad clone of an old React version, etc. etc. Painful all around. I would call this kind of codebase pre-LLM slop, accreted over many years of bad engineering decisions.

for Anthropic and OpenAI there is a very real danger that people invest serious time finding the strengths of alternative models, esp Chinese/open models that can to some degree be run locally as well

it puts a massive backstop at the margins they can possibly extract from users

What size of Qwen is that, though? The largest sizes are admittedly difficult to run locally (though this is an issue of current capability wrt. inference engines, not just raw hardware).

I'm directly using https://chat.qwen.ai (Qwen3.6-Plus) and planning to switch to Qwen Code with subscription.

How "social" does Quen feel? The way I am using LLMs for coding makes this actually the most important aspect by now. Claude 4.6 felt like a nice knowledgeable coworker who shared his thinking while solving problems. Claude 4.7 is the difficult anti-social guy who jumps ahead instead of actually answering your questions and does not like to talk to people in general. How are Qwen's social skills?

Qwen feels like wise Chinese philosopher. Talks in very short elegant sentences, but does very solid work.

> Talks in very short elegant sentences

This is not my experience at all, Qwen3.6-Plus spits out multiple paragraphs of text for the prompts I give. It wasn't like this before. Now I have to explicitly tell it not to yap so much and keep it short, concise and direct.

You may be interested in "radiance cascades"

What do you use instead of the Claude code client app?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com