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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?

#151

Post by triMichael »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #82
rvnx wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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'll add to that: you are more likely to have a good experience if it has a lot of relevant data that it was trained on. You are also more likely to have a good experience if errors don't cause major issues.

So one-shotting a game of Snake should be great (tons of training data, errors are easily caught because it's a small program). Similar with building a lot of web UI front end, or one-shotting a personal project. On the other hand, I haven't been convinced that it's good enough to maintain large codebases or assist with niche topics that are not very well documented.

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

#152

Post by bonoboTP »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #144

Pretty much immediately after I asked the LLM to perform a complete code review of my projects. I've been programming alone for years, that alone was life changing for me. It only got more impressive from there.

Opus 4.5 fixed so many issues with my self-coded research projects, and allowed me to port between tensorflow and Pytorch in a much shorter time than manually. Helped a lot with docs too.

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

#153

Post by steno132 »

My first time using Grok. I'd been so used to using AI models that declined to do things I told them, like tagging people in a video feed, helping me "optimize" my taxes or managing my Twitter bot farm.

Grok just did these things for me, no questions asked, no ethical judgments. No woke.

Elon really doesn't get enough credit for Grok. People don't want the most powerful reasoning model or "constitutional AI". They just want a model that does what they say. Elon understood that insight (like he usually does) and no one else really did and that's probably why Grok has been growing rapidly over the last two years or so.

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

#154

Post by rustyhancock »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #93
andrewthornton wrote: post #77

My 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 an…

Ikeas instructions are such an oddity.

It feels like there is precisely enough information to deduce each step. But only just enough miss one clue and you have something on upside down on step 7 that you won't notice until step 37.

I feel whoever makes them could probably make a wicked NY Times Crossword puzzle.

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

#157

Post by Kon5ole »

From actual use I've not had a "oh shit" panicked moment yet. More like a bunch of "Holy shit" euphoric moments.

So far I feel like I as a developer have gained actual superpowers, and can deliver results that make my stakeholders slackjawed with awe. I love it.

It will last perhaps a few months more, then they'll expect it. Delivering more features faster will be the new normal. But I think system developers, as in people who actually like to deliver new features and systems, will still be the ones doing it.

Fundamentally I think LLM's just change how to make information systems, they don't change who has the inclination to make them.

MBA's making excel sheets that do more than excel was ever intended to do has given programmers lots of work over the years. Such solutions identify a need for a properly designed system and frees up the budget to hire programmers.

If the same MBAs start vibe coding, I predict we will get even more to do, for similar reasons.

I may be horribly wrong, and if the day comes that I realize that it will be the "oh shit" panicked moment. So far so good!

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

#159

Post by jasondigitized »

First time using Claude Code I was rather impressed by how quickly I was able to build out a website with Vue and Supabase. Cool. So.......I always wanted to create a iOS app but knew nothing about Objective C or Swift or XCode. "I wonder if Claude Code can build a iOS app for me?".

I went from 0-to-1 and shipped a podcast player into the AppStore in 2 weeks. Not a simulated app on XCode.....literally a fully approved app on the AppStore. Claude Code walked me through installing XCode all the way through to running a final audit on the app so I wouldn't get flagged during review. Mind blown.

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

#160

Post by sph »

Yesterday when I found a dude that vibecoded an entire game engine programming course from triangle to ray tracing, five lessons per day, in a week, in a library that just got released last year. Code, screenshots + body of the lesson in a README. Overly engineered project, but the two or three example I tried compiled and ran (yet somehow the automated cmake just hung, maybe a problem on my end)

I was already the king of doomers, now it has left me with even more nausea at this entire field and its future. Despite still needing an experienced dev to run the thing, companies operate on cost cutting, people operate on corner cutting and the result is inevitably mountains of code no one needs, no one has reviewed, that is more easily thrown away than fixed. The internet will be inundated by shit no one needs. Open source is dead.

I hope it was all worth it. I don’t want to imagine what software will look like when the people that liked the art of creating software properly have all left, and only the people that never knew how to program, and never knew understood why more code always means more problems, run the show.

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