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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?

#221

Post by philovivero »

jachee wrote: post #173

I haven’t had that yet. I tried again this week, and CoPilot Plan Mode read the same 5-line markdown file 18 times over the course of 5 minutes of churning on a simple request, then provided zero value over what I posed in the request itself, and hallucinated things about my terraform repo that were just flat-out wrong. As an Infrastructure/Cloud engineer, I’m far from worried about AI coming for my job.

Weird.

I had LLM (Claude) work with OTF to generate an entire infrastructure HCL (from existing). It built a very nice project that seemed idiomatic from my experience.

Then used it over the course of several hours to refactor it to take variables/inputs for everything, then over a few days got it to a state where it would create entire new environments "equivalent" to the original environment. Days because you know... it's TF in AWS which is slow, so the round-trips were probably 90% of the wall-clock time here.

I'm not a hardcore veteran Infra eng, but I'm decent, and I was able to do way more with LLMs than if I'd had to do it myself.

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

#223

Post by ok123456 »

Sobrino wrote: post #213

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 d…

And now you can do all of that locally with qwen3.6:35b.

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

#224

Post by djmips »

rerdavies wrote: post #99

Working on a Spice compiler to convert schematics for classic guitar pedals into real-time executable code. I provided a reference to a The Spice Manual 2nd ed. a page number and an equation number, and asked Claude to implement it (not really expecting it to succeed). It proceeded to implement not only the equation, but the calculation of the Langrangian of the functio, another 30 lines below, which required taking…

That sounds pretty fun. I guess I could just Claude to do this hehe but are you sharing?

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

#225

Post by jodacola »

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…

Very similar thing this week, and an interesting story to go along with it!

I called my normal HVAC company for my rental home because the tenant reported the AC wasn't cooling the house. When I called, I got one of the latest AI voice assistants to help me, and it was an awful experience and I ended up not hearing back after the assistant told me the office would call me back.

So, I went over to the house and used ChatGPT to help me diagnose the issue by taking some photos of the compressor panel outside. It walked me through what to check, I provided some diagnostic codes I witnessed... and it walked me through the very simple repair of replacing the $25 capacitor. It was going to cost me almost 4x that just for the service call to diagnose what was wrong in the first place.

So, the weird experience was: Gen AI made me lose trust in my normal HVAC company, and more Gen AI basically allowed me to replace my HVAC company and do the repair myself all in one day.

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

#227

Post by SamuelAdams »

jp57 wrote: post #175

Actually seems absurdly simple now, but sometime last year I was trying to figure out what I'd need to tow my daughter's car cross country with my truck: what are the trailer/dolly options, what do they cost, can my truck actually tow the combined weight, etc. I started out prompting ChatGPT kinda how I would with Google, one small prompt at a time, asking about various details. But after one or two of those I just t…

Similarly, I used gen ai to review a real estate purchase. I provided Zillow listing photos and serial numbers of all appliances, the electric panel, and a few additional not pictured areas that I took during the walk through.

I prompted the AI to write a report as if it were a home inspector and it actually did a better job and identified some issues the paid 750 usd inspector missed.

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

#228

Post by fowlie »

I was tasked to rewrite an Oracle Apex webapp. 70k lines of PL/SQL. I asked Claude Sonnet 4.6 to read it all and boil it down to markdown file with business requirements. Took about 15-20 minutes, and I got a 700 lines long markdown file to guide me during the rewrite. I've since had great joy using /grill-with-docs!

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

#229

Post by djmips »

dang wrote: post #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 baf…

I made a personal project game 20 years ago that I knew had a bad bug in it and so I never did a final release but at the same time I never returned to it to debug but yesterday I noticed it at the top of my Github, it started with A, so I described the issue and Claude found the bug instantly and after a few back and forth discussion we came up with a good fix that I'm satisfied with. So I guess I can do a final release now. :D Sweet - feels good to put that to bed.

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

#230

Post by idopmstuff »

Two of them:

1. ChatGPT 3.5 wrote me a script to pull some data out of Shopify and write it to a Google Sheet. Nothing remotely impressive by today's standards, but I had just commanded a computer to write code in plain English and it worked!

2. I own a bunch of e-comm brands, and with every new image model I tried to get product photography. Nothing worked until Nano Banana Pro, when suddenly I gave it a crappy iPhone pic of a product and got back a fully usable whitebox photo of it. Then I tried making the sort of infographic-style images you usually see on Amazon, and it nailed those too! In hindsight they weren't perfect, but more than good enough to use. I was about to ship that product to my photographer, and I would've had my designer make the infographic images, so that was the first time AI actually replaced a human contractor for me. Pretty big "Oh shit this is going to seriously impact employment" moment. Wrote about it here: https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/p/ai-just-took-my-...

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