Mine was when I used Stanford Alpaca, and realized that they had transformed Llama 7B into a credible facsimle of ChatGPT with just $600.
Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
91–100 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#92When I was making matplotlib charts with gpt 3.5, and I was like okay this is somewhat impressive
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#93My 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…
I've been fitting a kitchen and chatGPT has been useful to bounce ideas off and resolve issues. Of course if IKEA's documentation wasn't so sparse I wouldn't need it but that's another story.
I guess I'm seeing similar benefits to a novice programmer. Professionals would scoff at my work but they are expensive and difficult to work with. Meanwhile I'm getting the job done.
On the other hand I'm not touching AI for any development work. I'm too worried about my skills atrophying or not properly learning anything new.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#94Nvidia GauGAN and deep-daze amused me immensely at the age of 14 or so. I've had "a man painting a completely red image" saved for a long time.
It is insane how primitive modern inpainting and txt2image make these two projects look.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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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, th…
I still don’t get it I can dictate a prompt and sometimes I do it so quickly the text looks like a drunken parrot dictated it and it still always gets exactly what I’m asking for. I’m just going to attribute malice to the naysayers.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#96I was trying to replace my koi pond pump last weekend and the model numbers on it had washed away. I took a picture of it and it immediately narrowed it down to two models but wasn’t sure if it was the 4500 model or the 2500 model. I asked it how I can determine which one it was. It then asked me to measure the length and that the 4500 was 11 inches and the 2500 was 9 inches. Mine was 11. It was cool it was able to r…
Ha! I did the exact same thing about 2 months ago. It saved me a lot of headache and research.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#97Non-technical people I know are starting to take AI responses to their questions as 100% true fact.
It’s usually right. This isn’t as big of an issue anymore.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#98Didn't have one. I was convinced I would experience this since I was a teenager. Blame science fiction if you will.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#99Working 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 symbolic partial derivatives for a not-at-all trivial function, and successfully figuring out which variable was which in the resulting matrix. The source material just said "Lagrangian of", and did not provide the partial differential equations. And then providing a comment that identified the page number and equation number in the source text for the "Lagrangian of" equation.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#100I'm a terrible cook, but just by using Claude as a tutor I've managed to make 5 different recipes in a row and they all tasted fantastic, restaurant quality.