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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?

#141

I 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 e…

CI/CD?

My non-techie friends send me screenshots of ChatGPT. I guess that’s a modern micro aggression?

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

#142

When I realized that an LLM can process all the traffic in Slack that overwhelms me daily and give me a manageable digest. How long until they intermediate most of our social interactions? Sooner than we can possibly adapt, I think.

Many people got something of a head start adapting though? Seems like it's been the proposition from "social" "media" companies since 2004 or so to stop talking to friends, talking to their computers instead and consuming the half-digest of friend's transmissions mixed with ads/psyops coming in?

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

#143
I have a large token budget as part of my work. A coworker was scanning some repos for vulnerabilities as a test. He found a scary looking remote exploit in a popular project and shared it with me for a second opinion. I spun up a local instance of the project and ran the POC against it: nothing. Turns out it needed some configuration knobs tweaked to lower some security protections.

So I told the AI what happened, and asked it to fix the POC so that it would work with the default configuration. It chewed away at that for a few minutes until it cheerfully patched the POC into a weaponized version. I ran it. The local instance, which I had just downloaded, compiled myself, and launched with the default config file, immediately crashed.

I got the cold sweats. I've read this novel. I've seen this movie. Wow. I have a blinking cursor on the console of a nuclear information bomb. I tossed and turned all night, got about half an hour of actual sleep, and probably looked like I'd seen a ghost at work the next day.

On the plus side, it gave our team some very clear ethical and moral guidance: we're going to do this, and we're going to share our findings with the relevant authors, because we can. Because I want to live in a world where the good guys are trying to fix problems before the bad guys can find them, I decided to help build that world. It was like, well, I guess this is what I'm doing now.

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

#145
My oh shit moment was Opus 4.6 before it got nerfed.

It helped me refactor my old app. Something I always wanted to do, but didn't have time/mental capacity to do in a short space of time.

I wrote a short prompt, explaining how I want it to look like and which files it should go through. It asked me a few clarifications and then basically one shotted it.

Everything compiled and worked. Now my internal app is much much easier to extend and test.

I tried few more things like that and spent like £5k in the tokens in those two weeks.

Then it got nerfed and never worked like that again.

Now I don't use AI, because it is shite again. Even Opus 4.8.

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

#146

>Then ChatGPT hit the scene and again, many of us dismissed it as a parlor trick that would never amount to much. No, ChatGPT was the "oh shit" moment for me. Anyone who had touched a computer before that knows how big of a leap that was.

Me too, it came out of nowhere even as someone who played with GPT2 before. The moment completely changed what I have worked on since.

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

#148
Claude helped me to rewire my first digital Märklin model train. It pulled the documentation of the control keyboards 6040 and told me how to wire them properly to the routers.

And I restored an old vintage amp with the help of schematics, multimeter and Claude. That was really cool.

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

#149
post #55

Non-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.

People taking ‘usually right’ as ‘100% true fact’ sounds like a pretty big issue to me. Of course, it’s the people who must learn to know and mind the distinction, first and foremost.

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

#150

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…

I think all those Steve Spielbergs hiding among the 8 billion - without connections and without hollywood names, having their day without getting filtered out by investor gremiums playing it safe - will produce enough material to be happy cineast for life.

YouTube is well poised for this.
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