Agentic development. From "chat bot" to bonafide, capable developer. "Oh, shit!"
Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
421–430 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#422Had an AI plot movie rotten tomato reviews versus cost for 2 adult tickets, plus candy and a large popcorn prices from the specific theater, and the round trip gas from my cross street, including only movies which would get out in time that I can be home by 10pm, including preview times.
None of that is mind blowing, but that Google or some other site has never offered me this type of analytics, is where I'm floored. It's a trivial query, but perfectly useful for planning a night out with my wife.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#423I 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…
I had that keyboard! I actually really like the piano-ish touch. I remember being sad though, when I realized they’d crammed all the sounds into I think 16MB (or was it 8?) and realizing how bad that was even by the late 90s! I think I still have mine in the garage somewhere… good times!
You mean bad because they could have used a larger memory module and thus higher resolution sound samples?
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#424My 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…
Also similar - our Tesla Solar stopped producing (again). 3 week wait for service tech. In the meantime I had Claude probe the inverter, find endpoints for retrieving status, re-setting AFCI and Modbus TCP (for HA monitoring), etc. Claude was able to obtain installer mode access through a review the javascript bundle. I had Claude turn all this into an iOS app, which I used to gather data to diagnose the issue over the next week. Had Claude summarize the findings into a PDF that I provided to the Tesla Solar service rep, which in the words of said rep was very helpful.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
From pictures alone? What are some examples?
What, the Zillow listing of you home doesn't have pictures of mixed 15 and 20a receptacles on the same circuit that an AI caught but that an inspector missed?
Is that what you're telling us??
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#426At my previous work, I was collating somewhat random unconfirmed animal sightings. I also had a separate database of animal occurrence probabilities (species distribution maps). I'm not a statistician but that sounded like a clear job for Bayes theorem: given a sighting and the overall probability of that sighting in that area (species distribution map), and some other assumptions about the noise of the sighting, what is the probability that the sighting actually included that species?
Claude asked me three questions and then wrote a beautiful Python implementation that queries the map and spits out a table of adjusted probabilities. Felt immensely powerful - I can do this 'on my own' now, I don't need to wait to find the right people or learn the right thing first.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#427It won’t help you with technical details of setting up an insulin production pipeline because that’s unsafe; apparently this could be hijacked for bioweapons production. Indeed this is the problem for a huge swath of technical protocol planning; the safety restraints are kind of ridiculous. The future job prospects for chemical engineering and biotechnology seem fairly secure.
On the other hand, it will teach you how to set up your own hardware at scale and run your own open source model on it and fine tune it with the relevant data needed to run your own biotech-pharmaceutical corporation (which will need licensing and legal, I doubt I trust it with too much legal advice though, as I would have no idea when it was hallucinating). That’s impressive, but every stage needs to be double checked so you don’t run some foolish command it suggests that bricks everything.
The marketing hype is the most annoying thing about the commercial LLM industry though.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
While I think this is true > If you use GenAI on things that you couldn't approach alone, it's an incredible tool. I think this isn't true in all cases > 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). I think even then there's a divide. I mostly work greenfield projects (and love it!). For these, AI has been a literal game changer. Our…
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Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#429I 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…
Yes, those tools are extremely good at reverse engineering. With a bit of know how, it is now trivial to reverse engineer any protocol or crack any software, often in a matter of hours or less. A lot of people in the industry have vested interests in this not being discussed openly so you don't hear too much about it, but the implications are huge.
What are some of the implications? Where does widely available mythos-level hacking lead? By people with a vested interest, do you mean non-cloud software vendors?
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#430I 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…
>Claude walked me through examining the some of the original software in GHIDRA, I wanted to be able to decrypt the files on The Complete New Yorker magazine DVDs. The old software was WinXP only, and crashed by the time you turned to page 3 or 4. It walked me through using Ghidra on the relevant dll, mapped out how it was using Blowfish, what the credentials were that it was passing, and re-implemented all of that i…
What was your setup for this and did you have any preferences set in Claude to get started with something like this?