I had an old astronomy app I wrote for pre-iPhone app store era Nokia phones (N900 etc.). I decided to get Claude code recreate it as an Android app. The old app produced several display pages for things like the positions of the planets. I was having Claude code recreate the app display page by display page, describing the display that should be produced, with no reference at all to the original app's code (or even its existence). After having it reproduce several pages, it added another one unprompted. The page it added was in the original app, but I had not gotten around to adding it to the Android app. The Nokia app's code is still on github, and somehow Claude must have made a connection between what I was asking it to code (without ever mentioning the Nokia app) and my github repository's Nokia code. It correctly implemented the page without me even mentioning the missing page. My jaw hit the floor.
Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
231–240 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#232I 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]
Just as bad as the technical debt is the cognitive debt in your codebase. When something breaks, your only recourse is to ask the AI how to fix it, since it wrote it and you did not have time to review all of its code. Except now the code base is so large it won’t fit into the context window, and the AI can’t help you, and…you’re screwed.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#233There was a viral Medium post that was about LLMs but then there was a reveal at the end was that the whole thing was a ChatGPT post. That was my first "wow" moment. It was on hackernews... anyone know what I'm talking about?
I wonder if we could tell now?
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#234From 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…
There is definitely a learning threshold and it's still early days. Not every developer has found out how to make efficient use of these tools yet. But I think most will, soon enough.
But I think my own clients will soon start to question why some feature takes ME a week, when I was able to deliver another feature in a day or two.
That they are features that used to take months, and even delivering them in a week is a goddamn miracle by 2025 standards, will not be relevant. They won't expect such features to take months any longer, based on what I've delivered earlier this year.
So I think that the past few and maybe next few months, maybe a year, will be remembered as a "happy hour" for this tech as a developer. These are the days that we'll talk about saying "those were the days". :)
I am still optimistic that "the normal" in a few years will be pretty much like it has been before - I'll be delivering features at work and tinkering with hobby projects at home, and the major difference will be a much larger scope and ambition for both.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#235I bought an Alesis QS8.1 super cheap in perfect condition (was a top grade digital piano/synth in the 90s). and then i realized that ALL of the software (which i collected from defunct websites and archived on github) related to it was ancient and after a while of getting tired of using WINE every single time i decided i wanted a cross platform modern equivalent that did everything that several of these different pro…
[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#236I 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…
I'm pretty sure that "a ChatGPT call" will happily add or fudge stuff in your scanned PDFs. That sounds like a massive liability.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#237The biggest "oh shit" one was that people are willing to believe LLM over humans and even humans that are in domain of the thing asked for.
The gullibility is terrifying
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#238For me it was earlier this year when I started dusting off some old stalled projects and had an agent work on them. In a few days I:
* Built a clone of the Alpha Zero implementation[1] my team built at oracle
* Ported my hobby NES emulator from javascript to rust[2] (this actually took less than 30 minutes and worked on the first try)
* Implemented all of the lessons from the C++ Grandmasters Challenge (which eventually led to a complete c++ compiler[3])
The thing that flipped the switch was using it to build things that I actually put sweat-equity in to previously. I knew how hard these things were to build, so it landed in a way that other projects had not.
[1]: https://medium.com/oracledevs/lessons-from-implementing-alph...
[2]: https://github.com/vishvananda/popeye
[3]: https://medium.com/@vishvananda/i-spent-2-billion-tokens-wri...
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#239The 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…
Yeah, ChatGPT both being able to generate conversational text AND act like a terminal absolutely blew my mind - far more than I ever would have imagined the approach would scale to st the time. Since then there have been more impressive tasks accomplished but nothing which put me into the same state of pure amazement.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#240When I wrote a captcha cracking convnet in 2000 and tested it ... And in 1 out of 5 runs it beat me.
2000 eh? Well ahead of the curve!