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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?

#461
Three moments stick out to me.

1) When I used ChatGPT for the very first time. I still remember, I asked it: “Write an advertisement to convince people to visit the North Pole.” It rapidly returned a witty, accurate, multi-paragraph text of exactly what I wanted and exceed my expectations. ChatGPT was the beginning of the modern AI boom and I remember being immediately impressed.

2) When I was working at GitHub, the copilot team gave the engineering team early access to copilot in VS Code. I can distinctly remember seeing the chat window in the code editor for the first time. I was probably one of the first people ever to see it. I remember playing with it a bit and asking simple Python questions. I knew that day that StackOverflow was dead and my mind was blown.

3) Big oh shit moment earlier this year that I believe for me started with the Opus 4.6 model + Cursor. The results were noticeably better, hallucinated much less, could solve complex problems with much less intervention. Early 2026 was a turning point for me as an engineer with AI. Throughout 2025, I was still writing the vast majority of my code by hand like I’ve always done- that is not that case in 2026.

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

#462

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…

Very similar thing this week, and an interesting story to go along with it! I called my normal HVAC company for my rental home because the tenant reported the AC wasn't cooling the house. When I called, I got one of the latest AI voice assistants to help me, and it was an awful experience and I ended up not hearing back after the assistant told me the office would call me back. So, I went over to the house and used C…

Even before AI, YouTube was full of videos on these topics.

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

#463
I took a photo of my ailing plant and claude advised me on how to get it healthy again (and how to take a cutting and nurture that).

This is some science fiction shit. I get all the coding stories, but that's a computer talking about a computer, it makes sense. Showing my computer a picture of a plant, and it not only recognised the plant, but diagnosed it and knew what to do... blew my mind.

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

#464
post #344

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…

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 do you mean? Everyone is talking about Mythos.

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

#465
I was learning Cloudformation IAC and Docker Compose stuff for my job. Had preview access to GPT-3. It could do most of this IAC stuff.

Asked it to write a Dr. Seuss poem about Keynesian economics. This was around 2022.

In hindsight, it would have been reasonable to quit my job right then and there and start working on LLMs

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

#466
post #464
post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do you mean? Everyone is talking about Mythos.

I think GP is talking about cracking, not pen testing.

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

#467
I was on-boarding to a new company/project about a year ago. Had a bunch of questions about the system architecture and such, but everyone was firing on all cylinders and couldn't spare much time to answer all the questions.

One coworker took some time to ask cursor some questions, and reported that the answer was accurate (I'm guessing he hadn't tried that before).

That was a game changer. I'd been using cursor for simple autocomplete or brainstorming but now I could have it analyze the entire codebase fairly quickly.

FF to now, I've given Claude Code read-only access to GCP logs and database and it's able to debug entire classes of errors and propose solutions.

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

#468
If you're senior or have opinions about things, you know the feeling of falling into a rabbit hole of stuff you want to fix when you look at certain parts of your system. "I was going to rewrite this 3 months ago", "oh wait this part sucks too", "wtf is this class even for", etc.

Before coding agents, I'd have to weigh fixing these against my official work commitments, often getting shot down when I tried to get it prioritized or tsk tsked for delaying official projects to make code nicer. Now, to a much greater extent, I can just fix the things. The agents aren't perfect and the process isn't anything like hands off, but it's enough of a speedup that I can fit it in alongside my other work without having to get approval for it or try (and fail) to get it formally prioritized.

Not quite an oh shit moment, but having the end result of those rabbit holes be that the problems are fixed is pretty cool, and far preferable to what was often the case before ("we'll put in a ticket and prioritize it during the quality sprint!").

edit to add another:

I've personally never been a big fan of preplanning architecture at a code level. It makes a lot of sense at the system and data modeling levels, but code is both easy to get wrong if you're whiteboarding it before you write it and relatively easy (compared to system design and data modeling) to fix when that happens. If it's just me on a project, I'll happily start bashing it out with a vague idea in mind and evolve the design as I go, knowing that I'll probably throw a way a bunch of what I write at first. I know I do good work that way, and I'm not wasting a bunch of up front time on a design I'm likely to throw out later. It's hard to work that way on a team, especially as a lead, for obvious reasons. Coding agents fit really well for that work style. They'll cheerfully write dueling prototypes of my code architecture ideas so I can see which one I hate and which one I like without talking about hypotheticals and abstractions on a whiteboard. They never get mad at me for changing my mind, wasting their time, or throwing away their work. That's pretty cool. I can have a quick, cheap answer to "what would this look like if I got rid of class X and split its responsibilities between Y and Z?", and I don't have to feel guilty for wasting my time or my teammates time if the answer is "oh man that sucks, what a terrible idea."

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

#469

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, downgrad…

Can you share that on GitHub?

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

#470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very similar thing this week, and an interesting story to go along with it! I called my normal HVAC company for my rental home because the tenant reported the AC wasn't cooling the house. When I called, I got one of the latest AI voice assistants to help me, and it was an awful experience and I ended up not hearing back after the assistant told me the office would call me back. So, I went over to the house and used C…

Even before AI, YouTube was full of videos on these topics.

The bar for finding them is higher, though.

Tbh, I think people feel more comfortable asking an AI. Even though I “know” it’s all smoke and mirrors, I still prefer the human-like interaction to the grind of watching video after video and building my own understanding.

OOPS… there you see how it’s going to end. I’m the meatspace button-pusher.

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