Readit Newsmikeshi42 commented on The current state of LLM-driven development blog.tolki.dev/posts/2025... · Posted by u/Signez
LLM’s are basically glorified slot machines. Some people try very hard to come up with techniques or theories about when the slot machine is hot, it’s only an illusion, let me tell you, it’s random and arbitrary, maybe today is your lucky day maybe not. Same with AI, learning the “skill” is as difficult as learning how to google or how to check stackoverflow, trivial. All the rest is luck and how many coins do you have in your pocket.
There's plenty of evidence that good prompts (prompt engineering, tuning) can result in better outputs.
Improving LLM output through better inputs is neither an illusion, nor as easy as learning how to google (entire companies are being built around improving llm outputs and measuring that improvement)
Very happy with CH, but I'm sadly disappointed with HyperDX:
* Not possible to reorder columns?
* Not possible to wrap cells?
* The doesn't seem to be a concept of "field popularity" as Kibana has (where you can also "pin" fields)?
* The log view's chart is very simplistic. No breakdown. Time selector is very primitive. Look at Google Cloud's log view if you want to see something good here.
* No field value autocompletion when using the query builder?
* Live view is annoying as hell. It scrolls to the top every few seconds even when there is no need data.
* Chart view is nearly useless. I tried to create a chart showing two time series calculations, average and P95 of a metric, and it doesn't draw it correctly, and the series get messed up, and overall I think it's not usable. Happy to explain further, but even a cursory test should reproduce this. Fortunately Grafana can access CH data and do a much better job here.
* The drill-down sidebar doesn't seem to have any idea what's important or not, so some fields I will never want to filter on are high up in the list and others are further down. I can't rearrange the fields?
* Lots of other nuisances.
Overall I found it much, much weaker than Kibana for both logs and charts, and Kibana is already pretty atrocious at both, so.
I can probably live with it because I'm desperate to replace Elastic with CH, but I think I will kiss the functionality of the Kibana UI.
This is really helpful feedback, a few notes:
- Reorder columns: You should be able to do so by modifying the order of the SELECT statement at the top.
- Wrapping: totally agree - this is something we're adding in, it's on the near term todos.
- Pin fields: you're totally right, you can pin values but that doesn't prioritize the filter in general. I'm getting this one in the queue.
- Time picker: I hear you with Google Cloud's time picker, they did indeed make a really nice one. Though I'm curious to hear more about the breakdown, is it wanting to customize how that chart is grouped beyond log level?
- Autocomplete: We had a regression if you're on v2.0.0 which is what I suspect you're hitting. If you're on v2.0.1 lucene should have field value autocomplete. We don't have it yet for SQL.
- Live View: Can you clarify what is scrolling? Or is this about disabling live?
- Chart View: I just tried really quick and it seems okay to me, do you mind sharing more details?
- Sidebar: Is this related to field popularity to pin fields or something else?
This feedback is all super helpful - you can probably tell we're still early in building out the perfect experience. I'd love it if we could dive in deeper either on our discord (https://hyperdx.io/discord) or email: michael.shi@clickhouse.com. Either way this has been exceptionally helpful :)
Why did they decide to build a custom front end vs leverage Grafana that’s already as the front layer?
We think Grafana is still a great tool and many teams are heavily invested in the Grafana ecosystem. We'll continue to invest in Grafana support via ClickHouse's official Grafana plugin and that won't be changing at all with this release.
However, there's a bit of a fundamental difference in the user experience we're targeting. Grafana has really excelled at traditional monitoring dashboards, low cardinality monitoring workflows.
ClickHouse unlocks a newer paradigm of high cardinality, high performance observability. It enables a new set of workflows/UX that allows engineers to query novel problems quickly as opposed to working off of static dashboards. That's really a big focus of ours, so you'll see we do exploration/search/syntax/UI layout is quite different from Grafana due to this.
At this point it isn't even an original realization of ours. Just as an example, Shopify built a complete custom app (only keeping the auth part of Grafana) while migrating to ClickHouse for similar reasons.
For anyone else stumbling on this: looks like MongoDB is used for the storage layer of the UI.
Ah sorry I missed that part of the question, yes MongoDB and ClickHouse are the two stateful services. We'll be looking to see if we can offer some mode to simplify it down to just ClickHouse but that'll take a bit more work.
Very cool, reminds me of SigNoz.
How would I self host this in k8s? Would I deploy a ClickHouse cluster using the Altinity operator and then connect it using the HyperDX local mode or what is the recommended approach to self-host ClickStack?
For getting started, we have a really easy to use helm chart that I'd recommend checking out first: https://clickhouse.com/docs/use-cases/observability/clicksta...
Interested in a comparison between both too!
I've written up a detailed answer in a thread below earlier :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44196484
Keep in mind that the first reasoning model (o1) was released less than 8 months ago and Claude Code was released less than 6 months ago.
Slot machines on the other hand are truly random and success is luck based with no priors (the legal ones in the US anyways)