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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?

#281

Post by paolovictor »

My kids often ask me to print math puzzles/crosswords/etc from the web. There was a particular maze puzzle that my older one really liked, but it seemed she had already finished every single one I could find.

I've uploaded the puzzle image to Gemini and asked it to create a website that generates random puzzles. In less than a minute it had a fully working faithful generator. My kid had suggestions on how to make the puzzles more challenging (more operations, larger grids, etc) and Gemini implemented them without breaking a stride. After that we asked for more puzzle ideas and created generators for each one on the spot.

Was the code pretty? Nope. Did it achieve its purpose? Yup. Did it perform in minutes work that would take at least a few hours[1]? Absolutely.

[1] Quality notwithstanding, but my manager (i.e. my kid) only cares about the end result ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

#282

Post by calf »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #268

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 d…

That's amazing, as someone who struggles to find something useful to do with LLMs. How long does this take, several minutes or more? Do you need a paid version of Claude Code for this?

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

#285

Post by williamdclt »

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…

> projects I simply could not have ever approached alone.

I think that's part of the divide between enthusiasts and naysayers. If you use GenAI on things that you couldn't approach alone, it's an incredible tool. If you use it on stuff that you're pretty good at, it's not a gamechanger (and if you're an expert, it's a minor boost at best). Many people's job are about doing what they're an expert at.

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

#286

Post by Const-me »

None so far. When I try to use these language models in the primary areas of my expertise like SIMD or GPGPU they fail to do any good. When I ask them to implement some general-purpose stuff, the output is too low quality to be useful in my software.

Still, find them incredibly useful for code review (despite unable to write good C++ or C#, smart enough to detect issues there), also dealing with technologies outside of my area of expertise like Python or web stuff.

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

#287

Post by gscott »

evdubs wrote: post #51

I tried to see if an LLM service provider could rewrite some legal docs where nothing was hallucinated in order to follow a consistent format to see what may be missing in the document. It could do that. Next, I wanted to see if this could be done with a local LLM. Gemma-4 handles this fine with an 8GB video card and a large context (128k). Next, I wanted to see if the model could also OCR these docs and translate th…

My son is in a lawsuit with his bank where they put through fraudulent charges and wouldn't charge them back then the bank sued him for the money. He is using Claude and Gemini fighting the original lawsuit and now has a counter-suit 100% using AI for everything. He puts it into different AI's to check everything against each other and to come up with more ideas. He started with ChatGPT, moved to Grok, then Claude, but now Gemini is turning out to be the strongest.

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

#288

Post by Cheetah26 »

ssl-3 wrote: post #109
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…

That's pretty great. (Though that's also the kind of hands-on troubleshooting step/fix that a person could just google for and find pretty easily back before the internet got all fucked up.)

Your parenthetical really describes my experience with AI searches. 5+ years ago I could find most things within one or two quick searches, now it takes so many that of course I'm going to reach for AI because that's the only way to get back to my baseline efficiency.

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

#289

Post by amelius »

rvnx wrote: post #63
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]

I still would like to hear a public apology from the stochastic parrot crowd for their deceptive framing. Or maybe it was just incompetence.

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

#290

Post by jasonfarnon »

cineticdaffodil wrote: post #110
bonoboTP wrote: post #102

The 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…

I think all those Steve Spielbergs hiding among the 8 billion - without connections and without hollywood names, having their day without getting filtered out by investor gremiums playing it safe - will produce enough material to be happy cineast for life.

Many Internet technologies like Youtube or soundcloud gave content creators direct access to an audience. If you were funny/creative/talented/attractive/in the right place at the right time/etc you could cut out the middlemen and capitalize on that directly. What is the hidden talent these Spielbergs possess that AI will enable? It's doing the writing, videography, etc. I imagine at most these hidden Spielbergs will be filtering output, like looking at a book of wallpapers and choosing what they like. Maybe some great movies get made, but it will just be the result of selection effects on the sheer number being made.
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