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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?

#401
I don't know if this was my "Oh Shit" moment but 4 weeks ago I thought'd I'd try vibe coding a WebGPU 3D Node Based Editor.

https://github.com/greggman/sedon

It was just an experiment and I probably won't work on it more but still, I was blown away with how far we got. There's a quite a bit we worked through even though it was only part time of those 4 weeks.

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

#402
post #191

A friend had the power supply die on his high-end turntable. He took a picture of each side of the supply's PCB, handed it to Claude, and it gave him back a schematic.

I mean even assuming that this was strictly a 2-layer board, you can still route traces underneath parts like ICs, connectors, etc.. I could believe it was a simple board (for a phonograph and all), but I'd be interested in seeing how well it actually matched. Did he get a new board fabbed and it just worked?

He said that it got a few resistor values wrong, but other than that it was correct. I assume it was actually a single-layer board. (Nobody's doing this with a mini-ITX motherboard.)

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

#404
I was reviewing a HTTP proxy implementation emitted from Claude Code 4.6 or 7. Don’t remember. I saw that it could rapidly create convincingly plausible code with tons of rationalizing that further strengthened all of it not just its human’s but its own wild leaps of judgment and thinking. But the code was completely insecure and didn’t follow or really seem to understand HTTP rfcs at all despite the “author’s” direct prompting to use them as a reference.

I realized “oh, shit”

We are so very fucked.

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

#405

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.

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.“

The original comment was unclear whether the fan kept spinning while the furnace was running, or if all it did was bypass the safety and the fan didn't continue to spin while the furnace ran. They clarified in their response it kept spinning.

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

#407
For me it was torrenting a 7G ball of weights leaked from Meta and running alpaca.cpp (an early variant of llama.cpp) on my desktop computer in early 2023. I started asking it questions about the Roman empire and it answered me in English! The responses were generally incorrect, but no worse than what your average American college student might guess at, though delivered with much more confidence.

This was my desktop computer responding to questions in English, not some fancy server in a massive Google data center. Who cares if what it says isn't reliable? Being able to converse with my CPU in English is like having a conversation with a dog!

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

#408
I had an old 1st gen Amazon Firestick in a drawer for years, it had updated to the latest software and there were no public root exploits.

I spent a day bouncing between Claude and Codex and they researched, downloaded kernel sources, tried exploits and eventually got root via "FBUF/VCHIQ kernel zero-write primitive to patch live kernel memory". I was able to make the root permanent, debloat the amazon apps, downgrade the firmware etc.

It was amazing to watch and made me excited for the future where more hardware (old and new) will be available for repurposing.

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

#409
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…

> 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.

Just today I had my agent diff two logs to find a very nitpicky difference that was the cause of a problem, I pointed it at a ADO extension that was having issues, it downloaded the VSIX and decompiled the .NET binary to verify. Based on that information it suggested a workaround which I was very skeptical of, but well it worked.

All of this I technically could have done but I probably wouldn't because it would have taken too long without a clear payoff.

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

#410
It was something really silly: I asked Claude to help me think of a snide emoji for every U.S. President.

I hadn't been able to think of one for Zachary Taylor, because, you know, he's Zachary Taylor.

Claude proposed the cherries emoji, because it's said that Taylor the war hero died a ridiculous death from eating cherries and ice milk too greedily on a hot day. It was perfect, just what I had been looking for.

Claude gave me a couple of others, and we workshopped a few more. It was the workshopping that was most striking. I really felt like I was having a conversation with someone else.

https://blog.plover.com//tech/gpt/presidential-emoji.html

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