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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?

#431

Post by tern »

Opus 3.x building me a productivity system with Obsidian MCP originally.

Next was discovering "create a mathematical model of the problem and derive the solution as a result" type prompts.

But, the real "oh s**" was a longer process of spec'ing a compiler/runtime for real-time DSP (with a lot of novel ideas) and it actually working.

My sequence was: (1) if helps me understand myself, (2) if helps me put together good ideas, (3) it can generate novel ideas given the right inputs, (4) it can build useful tools on my machine, (5) it can compound good ideas into better and better ideas with repeated passes, (6) it can build significant, ambitious machinery that's way beyond my ordinary capacity.

Current frontier: it can compound large codebases into better and better machinery with repeated passes.

The key thing I track is whether I'm running a process that converges and compounds or whether I'm spinning in place / diverging.

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

#432

Post by toraway »

bko wrote: post #325
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…

> Hallucinations and poor guidance are still a regular day-to-day issue that makes it impossible for me to trust agents with anything. I often hear this. Can you give me a question where a major LLM hallucinates or provides poor guidance? Reproducible would be great Just a question to stump it.

Bad example but since it literally just happened a few hours ago:

Teams Copilot meeting assistant auto-renamed a meeting title/summary that’s now prominently placed at the top to “Month end close wrap up discussion“ because someone posted in chat “sorry can’t make the meeting, we’re wrapping up month end close”.

Really confused the next guy who joined the meeting and derailed things for a minute or two before we could get back on topic.

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

#434

Post by darksim905 »

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…

I know this isn't apples to apples, but given that I can't get Copilot or other tools to view a simple profile page on LinkedIn makes me curious/skeptical how this would work in this depth. I'm sure it's possible but I'm curious what the skills and toolchains involved were for you to get all that to work.

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

#435

Post by justinclift »

Claude Code has been incredibly helpful extending soap-go to better support XML handling in Go: https://github.com/tnymlr/soap-go

Specifically WSDL/XSD support, for auto generating code and similar from vendor supplied documentation.

The Go ecosystem handles JSON (ie Swagger) fairly well, but in-depth XML handling has been a weak point compared to Java where it's very mature. Claude is helping with closing that gap. :)

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

#436

Post by mayank »

tern wrote: post #431

Opus 3.x building me a productivity system with Obsidian MCP originally. Next was discovering "create a mathematical model of the problem and derive the solution as a result" type prompts. But, the real "oh s**" was a longer process of spec'ing a compiler/runtime for real-time DSP (with a lot of novel ideas) and it actually working. My sequence was: (1) if helps me understand myself, (2) if helps me put together good…

Such a great comment, and I agree with all of them.

For me in a similar vein:

- mar ‘24: thinking about how to survey the field and implement a hard research task in Natural Language Processing, and then just approximating it well enough with a prompt and a completions api

- mid ‘25: Llama 3 being able to analyze a good sized codebase I was onboarding onto, and synthesize it into diagrams that matched the quality of ones I’d generated by hand with deterministic tools.

- dec ‘25: opus 4.5 basically generating multi-class modules and tests perfectly (syntactically). Finding that errors were my own under-specification of the prompt. Stopped writing code by hand, mainly because it was good enough and came with tests, docs, build scripts, and other goodies for free.

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

#437

Post by darksim905 »

xtracto wrote: post #389

I probably will be burned for this, but with the help of an LLM I wrote a tiny program that captures video from a browser screen (Xbox live online FPS game), passes the video images through a small trained NN that recognizes people forms and presents the video on another screen. That way I can place a green overlay on enemies and they are easier to see on PVP matches. All that in around 100 lines of code, including t…

Why would you get burned for this? For people who don't know, sure, this smells of 'cheating' but it's essentially just an exercise in computer vision. Also, I'd posit that using various DMA type tools in the video game modding arena are impressive and unusually secretive because they make money on subscription services. It's fascinating to me how well some of those tools and mux hardware works. When you combine that with hardware we can now buy like the DGA with more onboard memory and faster interconnects, it's going to make reverse engineering, malware analysis, forensics -- a very interesting time for those who know what they are doing.

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

#438

Post by pmontra »

williamdclt wrote: post #285
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.

I'm about to complete a new non trivial functionality in a project of a costumer of mine. I spent an hour writing the spec. Then I asked Claude (Sonnet 4.6) to check if I missed something. I did, the sort of minor issues one notice after starting writing code, edge cases etc. That made me think about more issues and after a few iterations we settled down on a spec. I asked Claude to make an implementation plan and we ended up with 9 steps. It wrote the code for a step with new automatic tests and I performed some manual QA, which found further issues we didn't think about. We are at step 8 of 9 in about 12 hours of work. I would have needed a week to be there alone, with time spent researching and fixing bugs I created along the way, an inevitable part of our job but not exactly the most pleasant one.

This speedup is great. It improves the overall quality of the product (as perceived by the users) because I can ask Claude to add features that my customers and I would have dismissed because they take too long to implement. We would have settled down with a more basic UX.

So is it a game changer? It is in the same way those HTML / CSS framework like Bootstrap were game changers: suddenly every developer could create a decent and consistent UI in a fraction of the time with a few bells and whistles that we wouldn't have bothered coding. As a side effect a lot of web apps felt look alike mass products and web designers had to reinvent themselves, but the economics leaded inevitably in that direction. Would I spend again one of two weeks doing alone what I could write in a day or two with a LLM? Not anymore, not at this cost ($20 per month.)

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

#439

Post by smallstepforman »

I had a C++ actor model which required an Api like the following (std::function):

child->Async(&ChildActor::Method, child, args);

Refactored it to use small buffer optimisation and std::move_only_function)

child(args);

And saw a performance jump since no more malloc in std::function.

It also helped me decipher an animation bug in gtlf importer.

Productivity is x4 or higher.

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

#440

Post by monuszero »

We had a monthlong sprint adding robot motion planning features to our codebase years ago, and I was never satisfied with the result. As a small team wanting to leverage oss we vendored in OMPL, did the usual thing around caching and roadmap management. I knew there was a way to parallelize some of the algorithm we were using with simd or a gpu kernel, plenty of that in the literature, but it was never worth fighting CUDA or metal/accelerate or whatever for uncertain gains.

So when cooking dinner one night, I set opus 4.6 on a from-scratch native and accelerated roadmap planner implementation (after previously porting IK, FK, collision checking with some success) I had primed it by having a research agent drop a literature review in its docs folder covering the type of planner we needed. By the time the pasta water was boiling it was done- getting plans in a few hundred ms compared to several of seconds on our good old fashioned OMPL code.

For me it was the revelation that the economic value of cooking dinner could be compared to tackling an honest two weeks of coding work. The calculus has shifted - work that was once a risky or extravagant use of time is now worth considering.

For a small team who wants to focus on substance rather than implementation, knows what they want, and how to set up the agent for success, it’s a complete game changer in terms of what we can take on. Incumbents beware

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