Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I can't imagine where we are headed. You understand every step of what it did and can appreciate the complexity but it'll only take a few generations for this to become something like magic to the tech priests beseeching the machine spirits for blessings
Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
921–930 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#922Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#923I 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.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#924Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#925This pulled me into BLE protocols and private APIs and integrating with things directly instead of using 3rd party apps that were bad or limiting.
It's now opened up vibe-coding personal apps in hours, where I simply didn't bother before because I didn't have the time. https://type2fun.net/infinitely-scalable-personal-apps
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#926hey, my other oh sh*t moment was that i realized that ai burns me out. it never stops. ai made our deaktop conputers as addictive as our social media feeda, so i created RainBreak https://rainbreak.franzai.com/ the ai does not need a break, but you do. hope some of you like it free forever
What's the license for ?
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#927A few months later I've gone from Cursor to Codex to Claude Code, from a web app to a native app to an open-source project. It's been one continuous oh-shit since then. Time flies.
My biggest oh shit moment now? Watching my API credits run out.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#928My 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…
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#929One major problem is that people tend to make extremely bloated, 2-3 gb files for 100 slides and things freeze up, underperform, etc.
Working with AI I wrote a command line tool that replaces the file name with .zip, extracts the content and then run a series of resize, compressions on images and videos. Once done it simply packages back the zip and renames it back to pptx. Files drop by 70-80% in size on average with no visible loss of quality.
This command line tool was made in less than 30 minutes and the conversion was less than 10 messages back and forth.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#930I suppose the first was just learning about NNs and realising that this was the first time I'd ever heard a way to make computers theoretically think like humans.
Deep neural networks working in the early 2010s was another because that was a unlock for a whole new paradigm of computing.
2021 I freaked out when LLMs started to become useful at writing code. Enough so that I invested a significant amount of my net worth into Google at this point assuming that coders at about a decade left.
The day ChatGPT dropped in late November I felt physically sick. I remember the day well. I was visiting family and was like a ghost. Trying to explain that something that I was worrying about for a long-time was here was near impossible (and to long extent still is).
There was a moment in early 2025 when I realised agentic coding was becoming very competent and was solving actual problems with very minimal instructions. To this point I was worried theoretically that AI could replace human coders, but had not seen examples in practise.
Mid-2025 someone non-technical said they'd been building an app, and I was sceptical it could do what they said. I was blown away by what they were able to build.
Nov-2025 a non-technical person on my team wrote a build a product from scratch to manage a range things within our business. This was non-trivial software that would have taken a team of developers a year or two to have built previously.
In early 2026 coding agents regularly wrote code better than myself, repeatedly humbling me that the decades of effort I had to put into this craft was now more or less redundant.
At some point very soon I'd expect to see very advanced software products being one-shotted and clear evidence of recursive self-improvement.
Remember in just 3 years ChatGPT has gone from being almost useless to extremely senior programers no longer writing code. Things will change in unimaginable ways from here and you should be ready for that.