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atilimcetintoday at 3:23 PM6 repliesview on HN

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.


Replies

wg0today at 3:49 PM

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.

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muyuutoday at 5:31 PM

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

zozbot234today at 3:28 PM

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).

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hedoratoday at 7:54 PM

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

jasonjmcgheetoday at 3:43 PM

You may be interested in "radiance cascades"

jansantoday at 3:41 PM

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?

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