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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?

#941

Post by SubiculumCode »

jml7c5 wrote: post #878
SubiculumCode wrote: post #490

For 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…

Was this AI Dungeon? If I recall correctly, it was popular as a way to access GPT-3 which wasn't available publicly.

Also I remember that the link was temporary...like it was inactive a day later...so it may have been a little preview with gpt-3 for HN-ers....

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

#942

Post by consumer451 »

For me, it was when Midjourney first came out. The image creation was really cool, but after a few prompts I thought: Hey, wait a second, how it is inferring so much from my basic English phrases? Wait, it's deeply understanding natural language? How?? This a the crazy part!

A few months later ChatGPT was launched.

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

#943

Post by mh- »

zthrowaway wrote: post #696

“Farewell to stack overflow” juxtaposed with the realization that AI only knows what to troubleshoot and how because of stack overflow…

If SO was that heavily represented in the training data, I'd expect Claude to close my prompts as duplicates much more often..

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

#944

Post by hammock »

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…

Sounds like a blown capacitor

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

#945

Post by LearnYouALisp »

veidr wrote: post #393

2025 xmas day, was at my wife's parents' house in rural Japan, my kids were all playing with their cousins, I was posted up with my laptop just listening to some podcast about the benefits of making time for long walks in middle age (as if! ~lol) while running another "agentic team" experiment — 12 agents in parallel. I'd been feeding these bots a few projects, over and over — the hard part was the feeding them — tha…

Hm, narrows eyes after the tenth perfectly pair-spaced em dash.

Scans downward ... this does remind one of the general tone of fanfiction, which in fact comprises a large proportion of the text base of data.

//The realization that potentially many of these comments may be fun- or profit-motivated 'advertising'.

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

#946

Post by sunaookami »

bonoboTP wrote: post #102

The big one was definitely ChatGPT upon release in 2022 and specifically when people showed how it can role play as a Linux terminal and you can narrate events like "the data enter is now on fire" and "run" nvidia-smi, it would show high temps on the gpus etc. Or you could "explore" the homedir or some famous person. It convinced me that if it can understand so well how terminals work, tool use and agents are around…

>and specifically when people showed how it can role play as a Linux terminal

Ha, exactly the same for me. It was this blog post: https://www.engraved.blog/building-a-virtual-machine-inside/ that completely blew my mind.

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

#947

Post by boppo1 »

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…

I know Anthropic has blocks on using Claude for security reasearch; Are they not blocking Reverse engineering or RE tools?

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

#948

Post by alanb99 »

I had been using ChatGPT for help with some coding stuff - sometimes it worked reasonably well but for anything tricky it just failed.

But then recently I asked Claude Code to upgrade a particular library for me that I had forked and to reapply the changes I had made in my fork. It just did it as if by magic. As if it already knew everything about the original library. Given that the library is open source and on Github then Claude probably does know everything about it.

But then I can still have times when Claude Code does something really helpful (e.g. at work it helped create the first version of an MCP server for our own agentic application), while other times it can do some downright dumb things (like editing directly a library's code so something worked rather than changing my code so it worked).

Any time I'm feeling like the machines are about to take over I just do this: 1. Ask Claude Code to write some tests. 2. Same model, but different window, ask it to delete any tests that were just added but which don't test anything substantive.

It always finds something to delete that it had just added.

I'm not even talking about using a different model for code review or anything like that. Just asking the exact same model 10 seconds after it wrote some tests to delete the bad ones.

So I'm not yet at the slightly panicked stage :D

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

#949

Post by qnleigh »

vitorbaptistaa wrote: post #276

I am the CTO of a small NGO (10 people total, only 1 other junior Dev at the time). We supported two apps that were built by consultants. They were a mess. NextJS, React, about 4 micro services for a site that had 50 users per WEEK. I configured a devcontainer with the old codebase and an empty repository and asked Claude to rewrite it as an old school server side rendered Django app. Went to sleep. When I woke up it…

How much did the original apps cost you? That's gonna be direct job replacement for those people.

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

#950

Post by vedmed »

Most recently, I needed a smb 1.0 server to host an iso to an ipmi. I thought about it, rolled my eyes, bought a digital ocean server for $4/month and told Deepseek Flash Free via openrouter via opencode the root credentials and told it to ssh in there wget the iso and and make an smb 1.0 server and give the me credentials.

A couple of days before that, I told it to make a website, and then I kept telling it to do little changes and add crazy graphics. I just wanted to see what it could do. I made 30n3.com as a tech demo built on hugo hosted in cloudflare pages.

I was so impressed with this that I am fully transitioning many of my WordPress sites to this new gen workflow. I just redid my agency site (cyberbrand.net)to using similar method and the whole thing feels like I felt with geocities and tripod as a teenager. Its fun and I'm exploring and there don't seem to be any boundaries.

Before that I just used it for silly stuff like suing people and sending cease and desists.

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