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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?

#261

Post by alexfoo »

Someone in the house pressed the button to update the printer (Brother DCP-L3550CDW) firmware and the CSV page that was the basis for an existing Prometheus exporter (drum/toner lifespan, page counts, etc) stopped being a thing. Instead there was an HTML page with all of the information buried in various divs/etc.

I'd planned on writing something myself to parse the HTML and write a suitable exporter but I thought I'd give Claude a chance.

In a sandboxed VM I gave Claude a single static HTML file of the status page from the printer, also in the directory was the equivalent of "hello world" in Go, literally just the minimum needed to do `fmt.Printf("OK\n")`. The directory was called `brother-exporter`. That was it. No other instructions or information. I hadn't told it what it needed to write. I hadn't said what it should do. I hand't told it what language it was supposed to use.

Just by doing a `/init` in that directory Claude decided that it needed to write a Prometheus exporter in Go that would fetch and parse the HTML file from a printer (defaulting to 192.168.1.1) and then present the associated metrics in a way that they could be scraped by Prometheus.

It did this flawlessly in about 10 minutes.

I could have done it in several hours but this was definitely an "oh shit" moment for me. I think the biggest thing was the fact that it guess/assumed so much (correctly) from so little information in the beginning.

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

#262

Post by andrewthornton »

alberth wrote: post #84
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…

Do you mind explain more. Did you just prompt to Gemini what was happening, did you give Gemini photos of Furnance, etc?

Yes, here is my prompt. It also contained a video: "I have a furnace that will not heat when I reset the power to this unit. It makes some noise within its fan system for about three or four minutes and then I get an error light. Can you help me figure out what may be wrong here?" This prompt is not the best but I was freezing and in my attic.

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

#263

Post by jrumbut »

al_borland wrote: post #251

I won’t deny they are useful tools, but the hyperbole from the tech CEOs about them replacing all white collar workers in 12-18 months set the expectation so high that I’m still in the “fancy auto-complete” camp. It still feels nowhere close to replacing anyone, at least where I work. While useful, they haven’t been anywhere close to as useful as promised. Hallucinations and poor guidance are still a regular day-to-d…

Yeah, I think the missing piece on this is that the first thought they had was "we can do the same with less" instead of the growth mindset that made me interested in technology in the first place.

And it's amazing they didn't, because most of the tech industry only gets paid in a world where there are offices (either physical or virtual) full of people with money to spend during and after work.

It's still very rare for anyone to be asking "how do we do more with more?" But the person who figures that out is going to be the winner (and if no one figures it out we will all lose, even if you manage to transition to a job that still exists the world around you will be a nightmare).

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

#264

Post by [deleted] »

takee wrote: post #246

I was working on a science experiment (electromagnetics) with my 10-year-old kid that was going to be demonstrated at a science fair in his school. We ran into a hiccup with the experiment that we couldn't debug ourselves. I turned on Gemini live video call to help us root cause the problem. It was able to clearly articulate all the possible issues and eventually was successful in making our apparatus work as expecte…

[deleted]

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

#265

Post by andrewthornton »

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.

I was spinning it in reverse actually, but it would be enough to start the exhaust blower. It would also re-start pretty well for ~6 hours. It was probably the bearing. Also FWIW I have multiple carbon monoxide/air quality monitors and nothing tripped or alarmed.

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

#266

Post by andrewthornton »

llbbdd wrote: post #247
buckle8017 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you elaborate? I interpreted the same as the other comment that the blower fan just needed a hand start and kept going after the furnace started up. What you're saying only makes sense to me if the spinning the fan by hand allowed the furnace to start by bypassing the safety at startup, but wouldn't that mean that if the exhaust fan was stopped during normal operation (blockage etc) that the furnace would just ke…

It wasn't bypassing, I was just helping start because of what I believe to have been a bearing issue.

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

#267

Post by alright2565 »

djmips wrote: post #209
jzemeocala wrote: post #118

I 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…

That's fantastic. Did you use a Ghidra MCP server? It's kind of magical huh?

I've done a similar sort of thing with my camera lens' firmware updater just out of curiosity, and I didn't use any kind of MCP. It's able to write an automated script using the Ghirda API to decompile the program just fine, and then code exploration can be done by reading the code.

Claude needs good variable names a lot less than humans do, so renaming/typedefing doesn't seem to be as necessary.

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

#268

Post by AussieWog93 »

Literally just last night I have Claude Code the following prompt, verbatim:

"Whenever I launch Kodi on my Chromecast 4k, it crashes. I think this is related to a plugin or skin. It goes away for a bit if I clear cache but will eventually come back. Can you connect to the device via adb (I've run adb connect already), and debug exactly where it's crashing? Once you've done that, propose a solution. If this requires downloading, fixing, rebuilding and then uploading the broken extension via adb, don't be shy. I should have Android dev tools (Gradle etc.) on this Mac."

Lo and behold, without human intervention, it pinpointed the crash, downloaded the Kodi source, patched out a bug that had existed since 2016, recompiled it, signed it, then pushed it to my Chromecast all while carefully making sure to keep all my settings intact.

Got it to make a PR too (which is as of this moment unpublished; going to test more over the coming weeks).

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