451–460 of 1001 posts
It took HN a surprisingly long time to come to terms with the fact that professional SWE as we knew it was coming to an end.
In 2023/2024 we saw a demo of "denial" being a stage of grief live on this site.
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.
How did you give LLMs tool use?
If you don't firmly hold in your mind "this is a bullshit generator", you can get in real trouble fast.
I bought an Alesis QS8.1 super cheap in perfect condition (was a top grade digital piano/synth in the 90s). and then i realized that ALL of the software (which i collected from defunct websites and archived on github) related to it was ancient and after a while of getting tired of using WINE every single time i decided i wanted a cross platform modern equivalent that did everything that several of these different pro…
Related story, while applying a firmware update to my Kawai CA49 piano, I bricked it due to flashing the wrong file (The process was broken, and I got desperate and tried something stupid, which bricked the piano). Claude walked me through looking for signs of life, and since OTA from the phone app wasn't working for me, it downloaded the Kawai Android APK, decompiled the Java, figured out the hardcoded key used for…
My "Uh Oh" feelings are weeks later when I realize there is a subtle bug in what the model presented as test passing "awesome" that I didn't read closely.
The biggest uh-oh is when I get lazy and let it modify multiple files and make many changes at once, and YOLO because I didn't fully understand what it did. I can usually get away with that for frontend, but for data manipulation tasks if I don't understand it, it's likely not what I wanted and I'll be back again in weeks or more trying to figure out what changed.
That's more or less what life was before LLMs and copy pasting from StackOverflow. Most of the time if I didn't fully understand something, I knew I had to eventually get back to it to grok what changed before committing.
Now with LLMs the 'copy pasting' is much faster and handles boilerplate super well letting me focus on edge cases.
The fact that it completely autonomously read in a 5 MB firmware image of an old piece of test equipment and generated a Python script to generate license keys: https://tomverbeure.github.io/2026/04/12/AMIQ-License-Key-Ge...
My furnace went out during the 2025 holiday and I couldn't get an appointment with a repair person for 2 days. It was getting very cold in my house so I went into my attic and made several videos of the furnace attempting to start and gave it to gemini. It diagnosed the issue immediately and had me spin one of the components (a small exhaust fan) while the furnace tried to fire. It came on immediately. I had to do th…
Did you attempt to prompt it further into figuring out the actual problem, or know what they did to actually fix it? My bet is on a bad starting capacitor for the motor --- something that's a relatively cheap and quick repair.