Struggling to do named entity recognition, with lots of tagging by hand, and then seeing BERT just being able to straight up answer questions about a document. Had to sit down after that because it was past anything I could even understand.
Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
81–90 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#82I 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…
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I’ll explain it: these tools are non-deterministic and people have different experiences with them. For a few people every interaction is totally fumbled and they think the cheerleaders of gen AI must be lying, for others the chatbot hits one home run after another and lets them add microcontrollers to their CAN bus. When these people’s good luck runs out and they start getting mixed results like the average user, they assert the service must have been down graded
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#83I work with someone who is very AI-forward, high confidence, and very low execution. He has started sending me large PRs of AI slop that he assured me doesn't need to be reviewed. I quickly find many minor issues from an initial pass of one of the reviews. He gets mad at the team for slowing him down.
He also will paste chat logs with Claude into our team chat. Often Claude will say the same thing I told him but he either doesn't remember or doesn't trust human engineers now.
He has spent months working on agent skills and prompring.
He has not landed anything in 3mo, and has landed nothing useful in ~1 year.
This will be the rest of my career. Working with people in ai psychosis and trying to stay productive.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#84My 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…
Do you mind explain more. Did you just prompt to Gemini what was happening, did you give Gemini photos of Furnance, etc?
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#85Creating a functional python app with zero programming knowledge, back in the days of GPT 3.5.
That was enough to awaken my teenage hacker spirit.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#86I wanted to add gapless playback to an audio archive website I maintain. I tried myself before any of the popular LLMs were available. I failed. I then tried with the first LLMs that came out. They failed. Then, when the first Claude Opus was released, it succeeded. I now have gapless playback.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#87I gave chatgpt 3.5 the type signature for a co-algebraic encoding of a mealy machine:
newtype Mealy s i o = Mealy { runMealy :: (s, i) -> (s, o) }
Then I scrambled all the names and asked with a fresh context like:
newtype Foo z e g = Bar { blob :: (z, e) -> (z, g) }
And yes I understand that a newer model would not get confused by this.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#88Pre-GenAI I wrote a new interview question for a role on our team. As far as I know, the question was never made public. The interview required implementing a pretty basic CSS-in-JS utility in vanilla javascript. We instructed the candidate read the MDN documentation for the CSSStyleSheet interface, and then gave them a public API to implement. Passing implementations usually consisted of a ~10 line for loop, and was really just a test of whether a developer pick up and work with new libraries on the fly. Still, the interview probably had a 30% pass rate.
On a lark, I asked ChatGPT to complete the interview question in late 2022. I would have hired ChatGPT back then based on its first response! It was easily in the 90th percentile of responses I have seen.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#89We were experiencing abnormally high electrical bills and I could not figure out what was happening, so I downloaded the granular usage data (15 min increments) from Duke Energy, explained what we had in our house and when we typically used those items (washer/dryer, EVs, etc), provided a rundown of our energy usage plan, then asked Claude to build me a Streamlit dashboard that would help us understand what was going on and predict what was going to happen over the next months. The dashboard had a few simple toggles a levers. Claude was basically able to one-shot this, knew how to manage the XML from Duke Energy, etc... In about 20 minutes of prompting, I had a very comprehensive dashboard that was extremely helpful not only in diagnosing that specific issue but also in helping us understand how to further lower our electrical bills.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#90Honestly? Probably all the way back to when Nick Walton used the computers at his university to train a custom version of GPT-2 that let players experience a completely open-ended text adventure game in 2019.
As somebody who as a kid had tried feeding IF transcripts into a markov model to generate random rooms for an amateur MUD, this was mind-blowing. It felt like I was playing a version of the “Mind Game” from Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card.