When I decided to run codex with Qwen 3.5 27b running on my local machine. Up to that point the most success I have had was with using chat interferences as a Stack Overflow replacement. That was my first real taste of agentic programming, and it was both really useful (genuine productivity gains) and local.
Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
121–130 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#122Ovid's unicorn gpt-2 article in 2019 really amazed me.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#1232 years ago, wrote superfast float -> fixed point string code. That was cool.
Then a while ago, I plugged in everything at the datacenter and one device didn't come up. Plug into the management port, and Claude Code writes a C program to send a particularly crafted packet. Everything comes online.
Beautiful stuff.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#124I haven't had one. It still sucks and doesn't provide value, due to the inherent inaccuracy that requires me to carefully check every little thing it does.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#125I 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) } And it gave a really impressive analysis. Then I scrambled all the names and asked with a fresh context like: newtype Foo z e g = Bar { blob :: (z, e) -> (z, g) } It got completely confused and generated a bunch of non-sense. It was at that moment I realized that LLMs don'…
In high school math class our teacher swapped out all the symbols in the epsilon delta definition of limits, and asked us what this equation expresses, and many students struggled to interpret it.
I don't think this test shows that an LLM doesn't "understand". It shows more that it has similar failure modes as humans.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#126I have a buddy who's a consultant. His niche area is Netsuite and Oracle (I think). He's an accountant by training and as a consultant his gig was setting up these instances for clients, charging them an arm and two legs. He'd spend a lot of time golfing, and doing these setups was more than enough money for him. In other words, he had cornered that little slice of the market and was making bank. Shortly after ChatGP…
Sometimes it's the service you provide, not the value. They know it's in good hands, as it's always been (even if they could have rolled their own ConsultBot 2.0)
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#127We 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…
This can be a product.
The comment above literally said this took them 20 minutes of prompting. That doesn't sound like much if any value add.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#128Look, not to brag but DALL-E's "armchair in the shape of an avocado" was mine ( https://openai.com/index/dall-e/ ). I remember trying to convey the gravity of this capability to my friends at the time, who I guess were not as impressed as me.
Thats insane! I cited your image in a humanities paper during one of my freshman year classes.
I think the GP just means it was their oh shit moment, not that it was their image...
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#129I suggested to a masters' student that a problem we were working on would benefit from analyzing it mathematically. He brought an incorrect solution the next time we met, and on a whim, I asked Gemini to do it. Gemini got it right. I started looking for more ways to use it after that.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#130when ChatGPT was released. LLMs went from being a toy to a serious creative tool overnight.
They're still a toy, not a serious tool.