Oh shit, look at those RAM and SDD prices.
Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
491–500 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#492I'm making a 3D game and I hate flat worlds, a planet is much more elegant, both finite and infinite in gameplay terms since the surface is not expandable, but you can't hit a world border at the same time.
Cartesian coordinates doesn't work well for the player so I wanted a lat/long/altitude grid system.
I could have spent few days walking through stackoverflow and debuging my upcoming flawed implementation.
ChatGPT web version almost one shot the helpers in 2024 and boy, there were a lot of pitfalls.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#493For me it was right at the beginning. They said it was a dungeon game. It would describe a room, etc, and I would take some action. But I thought that this dungeon was built in some intricate database. But then I told it that I wanted to leave, got to an inn, where I flirted with the bar waitress, and soon we were watching the sunset in some meadow. As cheesy as that was, it was then that I went "oh shit" this is a m…
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Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#494I had a lot of such moments, including:
• Most recent, I had the option of either buying an app from the app store to train myself on the piano, or vibe coding a web app to connect with an attached MIDI keyboard and accept an uploaded MIDI file and give me an experience like Guitar Hero, and Claude did this in two prompts of their free (not paid subscription) tier, where the second prompt was just the word "continue".
• First demo of InstructGPT (predecessor to ChatGPT), because I remember how much worse the state of the art in NLP had been, and because I hadn't expected instruction following from the quality of continuation seen in GPT-3.x
• 2019, "This Person Does Not Exist"
• 2016, seeing style transfer and similar working (https://github.com/awentzonline/image-analogies) and what would now be called Deep Fakes (back when Two Minute Papers videos were https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_S1lyQbbJM4)
• 2015, when I (in retrospect, foolishly) believed Tesla about their over-the-air software update that introduced self-driving: https://www.popsci.com/tesla-cars-become-autonomous-overnigh...
• 2013, word2vec, "man" - "woman" ~= "king" - "queen", again because of knowing how bad the state of the art in NLP has been
(If you're wondering why "uh oh" from that, consider value in automating propaganda, and surveillance opportunities for automating comprehension of slang/cants like Polari).
• 2010, seeing the demo video of Word Lens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2OfQdYrHRs
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#495every time openai or anthropic uses their models to do some unheard of stuff like make a c compiler or solve an unsolved math problem.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#496To me it was just a few weeks ago discovering just how good and dirt cheap the recent flash models are, in particular Deepseek V4. Previously used Claude's variants almost exclusively.
I use them mostly in the "artist's assistant" role, doing internet research, writing a occasional function and doing transformations or refactorings (don't belive the agentic hype honestly), and for such tasks they seem to be well capable enough.
It seems that their open weights nature leads to competition among providers keeping the user cost close to inference cost.
Try them at least once if you haven't, it's well worth it, and the price difference is staggering
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#497Earlier quoted context omitted.
> projects I simply could not have ever approached alone. I think that's part of the divide between enthusiasts and naysayers. If you use GenAI on things that you couldn't approach alone, it's an incredible tool. If you use it on stuff that you're pretty good at, it's not a gamechanger (and if you're an expert, it's a minor boost at best). Many people's job are about doing what they're an expert at.
I think part of it is we often notice bad AI usage. The llm generated "art" by someone with bad taste, or the patches to open source projects by people who cant program at all and are teerrible. If the use is half decent people just dont notice it.
Anti-AI zealots (from a practical usability position. Not necessarily the moral ones) are like the people who looked at The Daily WTF and decided no humans are capable of programming. They had plenty of examples to point at, but refuse to look at decent to great programmers. The stories of "The AI deleted my database!" are prevalent and boosted by these folks because it confirms their biases. It literally doesn't matter if the LLM wrote strong warnings about the action about to be taken. They don't see that aspect of it. Just the fact that someone claims "The AI deleted my database!" is enough for them.
Despite all the liars telling me gaming is easier on Linux than Windows, most new games have some sort of issues launching with default settings. CC is able to dive into both the exact error logs and the recent community feedback on what tweaks / configurations are needed to make it work. I rarely have to go beyond two prompts before a game is playable. CC and Proton are enabling the Linux gaming experience far more than Linus ever has or ever was interested in.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#498My 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…
Very similar thing this week, and an interesting story to go along with it! I called my normal HVAC company for my rental home because the tenant reported the AC wasn't cooling the house. When I called, I got one of the latest AI voice assistants to help me, and it was an awful experience and I ended up not hearing back after the assistant told me the office would call me back. So, I went over to the house and used C…
With AI you just don't get the full service of a professional HVAC guy though.
Like the time I had one of the bigger shops in town come by to get a quote for replacing a dual stage fan motor on an AC. The tech asked me if I'd like them to replace the contactor while they were in there because it is a part that often fails. I asked what a contactor was and he explained it. "Oh, like a relay?" I asked. I told him to quote the cost for "replacing the contactor, while they're already in there."
He quoted me $400 for the contactor, $750 for the fan. The contactor itself I later found out was was $7. I literally laughed in his face when he said that.
So, like I said, you just aren't going to get professional level assistance from an AI. Thankfully.
To end the story: one of the other guys I called for a quote on fixing this unit repaired it for free; the unit was still under warranty and it was fully covered. The original installer of this $12K unit was refusing to return my calls. Another "Not gonna get pro level service from an AI" story.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#499I was sitting on a cafe listening to a podcast where I heard about a sci-fi author banging out 40+ books per year. How are they doing that?, I thought. Either a team of ghost writers, a boat load of cocaine, or they are using AI.
So I decided to test the frontier of AI, this was back in the early chat GPT era. I downloaded the app and proceeded to go through aln the steps of writing a novel, outline, summary of characters, plot summary, draft chapters, finalised chapters. I had an unedited manuscript by the time I was thinking about my 2nd coffee. It was a terrible novel, but it did have flashes of brilliance that could be harvested and iteratively shaped into something better.
I proved my thesis that AI could mass produce fiction at scale, and If I had a boat load of cocaine the AI and I could probably output 40 books per week.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#500Literally just last night I have Claude Code the following prompt, verbatim: "Whenever I launch Kodi on my Chromecast 4k, it crashes. I think this is related to a plugin or skin. It goes away for a bit if I clear cache but will eventually come back. Can you connect to the device via adb (I've run adb connect already), and debug exactly where it's crashing? Once you've done that, propose a solution. If this requires d…
I know this isn't apples to apples, but given that I can't get Copilot or other tools to view a simple profile page on LinkedIn makes me curious/skeptical how this would work in this depth. I'm sure it's possible but I'm curious what the skills and toolchains involved were for you to get all that to work.
Claude Code (or Codex, or OpenCode, or Pi, or Amp — whatever) can do this out of the box without any skills or special tools. The most important thing for making results like this easier to achieve (in any harness) is using the best current models. Right now that's Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5.