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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?

#211

Post by philipkglass »

buckle8017 wrote: post #201
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…

Gemini almost killed you. The exhaust blower not working triggered a safety that prevented the furnace from firing. Spinning it bypassed the safety. You likely inhaled a lot more carbon monoxide than you know.

From the description I thought that a degraded capacitor or lack of lubrication made the blower not start on its own, but the blower (and the whole furnace) would work if given a manual startup spin by hand.

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

#213

Post by Sobrino »

I worked in an AI (or well ML) consultancy before the ChatGPT moment. I remember we had a project where we had to extract a large sum of documents (country wide, terrabytes of pdfs of scans). We had to set up a pipeline that looked a bit like this.

Download pdf of scan -> Tessaract to get a text layer -> Clean it up with a language specific BERT model -> detect paragraphs of a certain type -> Look them up against a database we build with scored similar paragraps -> Do recommendations.

The documents were not standard and a lot of them were historical documents and handwritten or with scratched out text with corrections.

We had student workers spending days labeling the data.

It took us months to get it all working with a high accuracy. We were so proud.

Now you can do it all with a prompt and a ChatGPT call.

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

#214

Post by brntheater »

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…

Had something similar this week. Gas dryer started, but wouldn't heat. Gemini suggested it's often a thermal fuse. Took off the back panel and uploaded a photo to Gemini. It pointed me to the fuse (e.g. "the white rectangle above the blue and red cords") and walked me through testing it. Not only that, but it also linked me to the part I needed after I provided the model number of the dryer. Finally, it recommended cleaning out the vent as the fuse likely blew because heat wasn't venting properly. After a thorough cleaning of the exhaust and a $5 fuse the dryer is working fine.

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

#215

Post by zulban »

When chatgpt 3 came out the first thing I asked was a question like "If I put my cat in a box, put that box in a crate, move that crate to a truck, and drive the truck across Canada non stop, when I arrive on the west coast, will my cat be happy?"

It nailed it, referencing my specific nouns correctly, and lectured me about cat needs. And even identified that this sounds a bit like schrodingers cat as a possible test but explained to me why it wasn't.

I knew it was soon going to be a huge deal automating office work and code writing. This obviously was much more than just a 2010 chatbot.

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

#216

Post by kunjanshah »

buckle8017 wrote: post #201
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…

Gemini almost killed you. The exhaust blower not working triggered a safety that prevented the furnace from firing. Spinning it bypassed the safety. You likely inhaled a lot more carbon monoxide than you know.

https://www.covenantairesolutions.com/post/what-is-a-furnace...

“At its core, it's a small motor with a fan attached that has one primary job: to vent harmful exhaust gases out of your home before the burners ever kick on. This is the very first step in the heating sequence, and it's non-negotiable for a safe startup.“

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

#218

Post by archagon »

shreddude wrote: post #44

I could go on and on, but Claude recently decompiled the firmware of my camper van, documented all the CAN interfaces, then programmed an ESP32 module to talk to the van’s integrated systems (power, HVAC, lighting, tanks). That sort of embedded systems integration is completely out of my wheelhouse. I honestly don’t understand AI naysayers. I use Claude every day both professionally as a Solution Architect and person…

[flagged]

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

#219

Post by pesus »

buckle8017 wrote: post #201
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…

Gemini almost killed you. The exhaust blower not working triggered a safety that prevented the furnace from firing. Spinning it bypassed the safety. You likely inhaled a lot more carbon monoxide than you know.

Welp, AI almost killing someone is definitely an "oh shit" moment.

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

#220

Post by djmips »

johnfn wrote: post #165
Kon5ole wrote: post #157

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…

I do genuinely wonder if you’re correct that other people will begin to expect it. I feel I was suddenly able to do stunning stuff about a year ago, and I recall thinking this is nice but everyone will catch on to my secret soon and I won’t be exceptional any more. But 12 months have passed and I don’t think this has really panned out yet. Weaker engineers just don’t seem to understand that they can just ask AI thing…

Direct use of AI is going to be a filter on a lot of people - some permanently I suspect (especially say older people). But perhaps this will be short lived as the interfaces to AI are improved enough that everyone will benefit.
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