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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?

#901

Post by OJFord »

williamdclt wrote: post #285
shreddude wrote: post #44

I 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. 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.

Imo it's still great for areas you have expertise in, because it's a tool for automating the boring, repetitive, or time-consuming bits that you can then expert-verify.

I'd rather review & tweak generated test cases than write a load of boilerplate, test setup, etc. myself.

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

#902

Post by janandonly »

I’ve only ever built serious stuff in either bash or SQL.

I always had to check documentation to make anything work in JS or Swift.

Now with 4/5 prompt inwas able to guide Claude Haiku and Sonnet to make me a HTML+JS app that runs an LLM in local browser storage in maybe 1,5 hours of “work”.

You can check it here by the way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48410072

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

#903

Post by conductr »

userbinator wrote: post #460
andrewthornton wrote: post #77

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…

but it worked until the HVAC service showed up. 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.

Pretty much any motor having this symptom I swap a new capacitor in just to check before even calling a technician. I always just keep a spare on hand for my hvac and pool equipment.

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

#904

Post by positus »

I had GLM-5.1 via Claude Code create a macOS driver for an unsupported USB gamepad with a proprietary protocol. I answered a few questions and then let it run while I was away at work. After two sessions I now have a working controller on macOS. It did the research, created the driver, and tested everything (with some manual testing on my part) within a few hours. Amazing.

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

#906

Post by ivanvanderbyl »

I bought a FujiFilm X-E5 recently, which is an amazing camera for size and money, but I shocked at how miserable their iOS app is. It takes several minutes per photo to transfer. The camera and phone run out of battery before a small memory card is transferred.

So I got Claude to help me reverse engineer their protocol using a mixture of BT and Wifi capture tools, then built a native app in Swift that works on Mac and iOS and by disabling a bunch of on camera processing I got it to transfer a photo in about 3 seconds over wifi bridge. I’ve been able to multithread this to 3 concurrent downloads without crashing the camera.

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

#907

Post by jcims »

ivanvanderbyl wrote: post #906

I bought a FujiFilm X-E5 recently, which is an amazing camera for size and money, but I shocked at how miserable their iOS app is. It takes several minutes per photo to transfer. The camera and phone run out of battery before a small memory card is transferred. So I got Claude to help me reverse engineer their protocol using a mixture of BT and Wifi capture tools, then built a native app in Swift that works on Mac an…

I just bought a Sony rx100 and the software is just as terrible as I remember from the last time I bought a Sony. This is tempting.

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

#908

Post by ainch »

I'd spent 6 hours solving a gnarly RL problem (mathematically solving divergence of off-policy TD-Lambda for any value of lambda or behaviour policy).

As a punt I gave it to o3 (remember LLMs were 'bad at maths') - after 15 minutes it returned with the answer that had taken me hours.

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

#910

Post by jeffrallen »

Yesterday I dumped some data in via ``` quotes and finished with a minimax question (e.g. "which rows that add up to 96 minimize the column called disk"). One shotted.

The day before I half diagnosed a cloud-init problem to the point I was tired and grumpy. I gave the AI a login on the instance showing the problem and it found it in a few minutes. All that was left was for me to write it up for the client to understand.

To me, it's a meta "oh shit" moment, where I realize I get so much small value from AI I don't want to live without it, despite the costs I'm aware of (and those I don't know about yet).

Just like a smartphone, 15 years ago.

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