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

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

#1
Most of us were amused when DALL-E and its peers went mainstream, and we were quick to point out the obvious flaws.

Then ChatGPT hit the scene and again, many of us dismissed it as a parlor trick that would never amount to much.

Using LLMs for coding initially was a only small step up from basic code completion, and a welcome farewell to Stack Overflow.

I am curious: what was the specific moment that you went from those quaint, dismissive observations to a slightly panicked, "Uh Oh" realization of what these models can do?

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

#8
(1) Watching it do log file analysis in seconds that would have taken me hours (edit: days really), and which I would therefore never have done in the first place.

(2) Helping me with optimizations that I had been putting off for years because they involved learning curves that I never had time to take on.

(3) Tracking down bugs in code, especially race conditions and other concurrency issues, that were otherwise baffling.

(4) Finding information that I had been unable to find using Google searches (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42653136).

There have been others, but those are what come to mind - perhaps because, in each of these cases, it made something happen that would otherwise never have happened - not because it was impossible, but because the time and effort required was prohibitive.

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