When I realized I could build a lead gen mini-site in Replit in ten minutes that was better than I have ever had an engineering team build
Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
811–820 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#812I could go on and on, but Claude recently decompiled the firmware of my camper van, documented all the CAN interfaces, then programmed an ESP32 module to talk to the van’s integrated systems (power, HVAC, lighting, tanks). That sort of embedded systems integration is completely out of my wheelhouse. I honestly don’t understand AI naysayers. I use Claude every day both professionally as a Solution Architect and person…
My opinion is that it’s a defensive mechanism. I’ve seen it across experts in knowledge domains and my own. When you hear experts disagree it’s fine because it’s another human, when the LLM disagrees and provides an objective backing that’s often solid, people jump to defense and look for very subtle nuances they wouldn’t bring up with peers and those subtleties are often highly subjective and arguably often incorrect. That’s been my observation.
I for one welcome our new LLM overlords so long as some provide be solid living standards. Mistakes do happen and they aren’t perfect so experts often do have arguments but they do come stupidly close to approximation of expertise.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#813Literally the first time I used ChatGPT, within days of release. It wasn't so much panic as amazement. 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.
From what I can tell the majority of developers here have moved into the "Anger" stage.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#814Opus 4.6 . Before that it was iterating with the models on getting functions right. With 4.6, it went straight to one shotting entire functionalities and subsystems.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#815I probably will be burned for this, but with the help of an LLM I wrote a tiny program that captures video from a browser screen (Xbox live online FPS game), passes the video images through a small trained NN that recognizes people forms and presents the video on another screen. That way I can place a green overlay on enemies and they are easier to see on PVP matches. All that in around 100 lines of code, including t…
Go the next step and have the LLM simulate the controller and play the game for you.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#816Working on a Spice compiler to convert schematics for classic guitar pedals into real-time executable code. I provided a reference to a The Spice Manual 2nd ed. a page number and an equation number, and asked Claude to implement it (not really expecting it to succeed). It proceeded to implement not only the equation, but the calculation of the Langrangian of the functio, another 30 lines below, which required taking…
That sounds awesome. Do you think claude could help create something like the line6 "software based" guitars?
... and to answer your question directly. No. I don't think claude could do it unless you guide it very carefully through the process. You need to have a pretty good idea of what needs to be done.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#817Earlier 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'm about to complete a new non trivial functionality in a project of a costumer of mine. I spent an hour writing the spec. Then I asked Claude (Sonnet 4.6) to check if I missed something. I did, the sort of minor issues one notice after starting writing code, edge cases etc. That made me think about more issues and after a few iterations we settled down on a spec. I asked Claude to make an implementation plan and we…
You describe almost exactly how I work, except I always use Opus with effort locked at max. Lots of detailed multi level planning, then coding the different planned steps, which it at that point just one shots, with a plan review and adaptation after each step.
5x speedup and quality.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#818Had some unique concert audio recordings which had gotten corrupted when I moved the files during a backup. I had tried looking at the files and trying to recover them. It felt like they had the data but no software could play them. Sat on them for 5 yrs. Finally decided to try if AI tools could help. Tool Copilot 20mins and a lot of mucking around with hex dumps. First couple of times it got a semi working solution…
This makes me want to tackle my biggest annoyance - many of my files in iTunes refer to locations on a server that doesn't exist anymore, even though the files still do. Hmmm.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#819I could go on and on, but Claude recently decompiled the firmware of my camper van, documented all the CAN interfaces, then programmed an ESP32 module to talk to the van’s integrated systems (power, HVAC, lighting, tanks). That sort of embedded systems integration is completely out of my wheelhouse. I honestly don’t understand AI naysayers. I use Claude every day both professionally as a Solution Architect and person…
>projects I simply could not have ever approached alone. Learned helplessness.
That's not fair. It often has to do with limits of time and energy. There are countless things one would do if it took a few hours, but which one doesn't have a few days to spend on.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#820Reading a dozen comments here, the AI seems to blow peoples mind most often in domains they're less familiar with. Repairing furnaces, HVAC, towing hitches, camper van interfaces, printer debugging. It wasn't the user's career to do these things, it gave them a bump from very novice to intermediate level.
Dunn-Kruger AI. But hey, if it works it's still a powerful tool.
So far my use has done things I could do, but haven't explored in detail how to do - with simple steps I can guide and understand and finally automate things that were just below the "annoying enough to automate" boundary.