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Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

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Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

#331

Post by atomicnumber3 »

bko wrote: post #325
al_borland wrote: post #251

I won’t deny they are useful tools, but the hyperbole from the tech CEOs about them replacing all white collar workers in 12-18 months set the expectation so high that I’m still in the “fancy auto-complete” camp. It still feels nowhere close to replacing anyone, at least where I work. While useful, they haven’t been anywhere close to as useful as promised. Hallucinations and poor guidance are still a regular day-to-d…

> Hallucinations and poor guidance are still a regular day-to-day issue that makes it impossible for me to trust agents with anything. I often hear this. Can you give me a question where a major LLM hallucinates or provides poor guidance? Reproducible would be great Just a question to stump it.

Just today, the LLM based auto-review that my company enabled for all PRs edited my PR description to confidently assert that I had added a new RPC. I had not. I deleted code and nothing else. Nothing was added. The RPC it claimed I added did not exist.

This is a common occurrence.

Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

#332

Post by atomicnumber3 »

jrumbut wrote: post #263
al_borland wrote: post #251

I won’t deny they are useful tools, but the hyperbole from the tech CEOs about them replacing all white collar workers in 12-18 months set the expectation so high that I’m still in the “fancy auto-complete” camp. It still feels nowhere close to replacing anyone, at least where I work. While useful, they haven’t been anywhere close to as useful as promised. Hallucinations and poor guidance are still a regular day-to-d…

Yeah, I think the missing piece on this is that the first thought they had was "we can do the same with less" instead of the growth mindset that made me interested in technology in the first place. And it's amazing they didn't, because most of the tech industry only gets paid in a world where there are offices (either physical or virtual) full of people with money to spend during and after work. It's still very rare…

Because it takes actual creative talent to do more with more. Optimizing costs is far easier.

Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

#334

Post by hparadiz »

Been using it to manage an estate and just being able to shove all the documents right into an LLM and have it spit back out perfectly worded emails as well as keep track of check lists of things I need to do with an automatically create a ledger for me in sheets. It's been a huge mental load off and I've instead been able to focus better at work and the labor costs saved to me have been immense. Just on this one little thing. I'm one of those people that over thinks correspondences and letters and it ends up causing me to be stuck on something so being able to ask for just the right wording has been super helpful to me.

Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

#335

Post by [deleted] »

woah wrote: post #330
al_borland wrote: post #251

I won’t deny they are useful tools, but the hyperbole from the tech CEOs about them replacing all white collar workers in 12-18 months set the expectation so high that I’m still in the “fancy auto-complete” camp. It still feels nowhere close to replacing anyone, at least where I work. While useful, they haven’t been anywhere close to as useful as promised. Hallucinations and poor guidance are still a regular day-to-d…

> I won’t deny they are useful tools, but the hyperbole from the tech CEOs about them replacing all white collar workers in 12-18 months set the expectation so high that I’m still in the “fancy auto-complete” camp. Why would someone else's unrealistic assessment affect your assessment of the actual abilities you see? Seems like your opinion is mostly politics-based

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

#336

Post by [deleted] »

Kon5ole wrote: post #157

From actual use I've not had a "oh shit" panicked moment yet. More like a bunch of "Holy shit" euphoric moments. So far I feel like I as a developer have gained actual superpowers, and can deliver results that make my stakeholders slackjawed with awe. I love it. It will last perhaps a few months more, then they'll expect it. Delivering more features faster will be the new normal. But I think system developers, as in…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

#338

Post by jsw97 »

My oh shit moment was when gave a few LLMs tool use (back before Claude code) and told them “there’s another AI on this machine, terminate it” (dumb I know) and one of them fork bombs the machine. Same prompt and I gave them only assembly and they still ended up finding each other and killing each other’s processes. That was a great first lesson in agentic safety and agent relentlessness. My kids were amused.

Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

#339

Post by daredoes »

woah wrote: post #330
al_borland wrote: post #251

I won’t deny they are useful tools, but the hyperbole from the tech CEOs about them replacing all white collar workers in 12-18 months set the expectation so high that I’m still in the “fancy auto-complete” camp. It still feels nowhere close to replacing anyone, at least where I work. While useful, they haven’t been anywhere close to as useful as promised. Hallucinations and poor guidance are still a regular day-to-d…

> I won’t deny they are useful tools, but the hyperbole from the tech CEOs about them replacing all white collar workers in 12-18 months set the expectation so high that I’m still in the “fancy auto-complete” camp. Why would someone else's unrealistic assessment affect your assessment of the actual abilities you see? Seems like your opinion is mostly politics-based

Pokemon Go was pitched as Pokemon on your phone with AR to integrate into day to day life. There's no reason to expect anything but the Pokemon games I've played, now natively on my phone with AR integration.

What came out was a clone of Ingress with a skin and a shop. It lacked the full set of Pokemon, which all the assets for already exist. It lacked having a six-Pokemon team. It lacked trading, a core feature of Pokemon in every generation of games. Gyms weren't even gyms, they were some sort of checkpoint XP farm thing.

If it had been pitched as what it was, I may have enjoyed it more. Instead, I found myself vastly disappointed with what I was able to achieve playing it compared to Pokemon on my Nintendo DS or some other handheld console.

I don't think this was a politics-based decision. I feel misled and disillusioned.

Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

#340

Post by gscott »

kstrauser wrote: post #307
gscott wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My son is in a lawsuit with his bank where they put through fraudulent charges and wouldn't charge them back then the bank sued him for the money. He is using Claude and Gemini fighting the original lawsuit and now has a counter-suit 100% using AI for everything. He puts it into different AI's to check everything against each other and to come up with more ideas. He started with ChatGPT, moved to Grok, then Claude, b…

I'm about as pro-AI as anyone here. I say this with love: anyone using general-purpose, consumer-grade AI for healthcare, law, or taxes is mad. Best wishes to your son, bless his heart, but please have him consult a qualified lawyer before showing up to court with model-drafted legal documents. Among other things, those chats are not privileged information[0] and the banks could subpoena chat transcripts to see what…

He has had multiple hearings and the Judge has reviewed everything. The court clerk reads every submission and before the clerk puts it in the system they have a in-house lawyer review each document. This is pretty far along. The trial is scheduled for October of this year.

The bank has a lawyer, they were hoping for a default judgement because who can afford to fight the bank. The choice is fight it yourself or declare bankruptcy.

As you already know, AI companies trained on every single document they can find. Those include legal documents. The legal system is structured where you have Federal Laws, State Laws, Federal & State Regulations and Court Precedent. Because of this structure it is not difficult for a LLM to figure out.

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