Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI? • Hacker News Board

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

#511

Post by 317070 » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 7:03 AM UTC

takee wrote: post #246

I was working on a science experiment (electromagnetics) with my 10-year-old kid that was going to be demonstrated at a science fair in his school. We ran into a hiccup with the experiment that we couldn't debug ourselves. I turned on Gemini live video call to help us root cause the problem. It was able to clearly articulate all the possible issues and eventually was successful in making our apparatus work as expecte…

Ha, thanks for sharing this!

I've been building Gemini live since before ChatGPT came out. I am so thrilled to see it actually helping people in the wild!

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

#512

Post by moniosi » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 7:04 AM UTC

I wasn't skeptical anymore by the time dall-e came out, the public awareness of the existence of these models was enough for various nation states & investor hysteria to push further and further into the development and research

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

#513

Post by minimal_action » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 7:10 AM UTC

For me it was when I asked ChatGPT if a "while true" program would halt and it said it wouldn't. It blew my mind. In my Bsc I read and thought a lot about how human reasoning is not a formal reasoning machine, demonstrated by the halting problem, the liar paradox, etc. Suddently I saw a machine that can go this one level up above formal reasoning and resemble human reasoning.

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

#514

Post by amarant » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 7:10 AM UTC

I had Claude build a private podcast station for me. It integrated with Gemini to create a script for the show, based on a topic of my choosing, each talking segment ends with a presentation of the next song, which is played via Spotify, and is selected to have some sort of tie-in with the previous discussion. A tts model generates audio files based on the script, and a playlist is generated to play local file audio segment, then Spotify track, then the next segment etc.

An AI made a program integrating with 2 other AI, it's AI all the way down! and the result is great! I'm learning so much by having my own private radio host speaking about topics that interest me.

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

#515

Post by Flere-Imsaho » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 7:12 AM UTC

idiotsecant wrote: post #486

jsharf wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related story, while applying a firmware update to my Kawai CA49 piano, I bricked it due to flashing the wrong file (The process was broken, and I got desperate and tried something stupid, which bricked the piano). Claude walked me through looking for signs of life, and since OTA from the phone app wasn't working for me, it downloaded the Kawai Android APK, decompiled the Java, figured out the hardcoded key used for…

I can't imagine where we are headed. You understand every step of what it did and can appreciate the complexity but it'll only take a few generations for this to become something like magic to the tech priests beseeching the machine spirits for blessings

I'm not convinced that's where we are heading. LLMs are really good at explaining things ("explain to me like I'm a 5 year old").

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

#516

Post by ako » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 7:14 AM UTC

Probably over a year ago, when I first saw reasoning in action in a debugging session: it generated some code, ran it, could not explain the results, then said “let me add some print statements to debug”, reran the application, read the logs, and then stated “now I understand why it’s not working”. Plan, do, check, act in action, AI engineering its own context, and generating the missing information.

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

#517

Post by rochansinha » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 7:14 AM UTC

Built a physics-based dynamic digital twin for an electrolyzer system with full equivalency in thermodynamics, fluid dynamics and electrochemical reactions. A similar level of complexity is usually available in software like Aspen or Siemens which are a quarter million dollars license/yr. Insane.

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

#518

Post by justforreading » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 7:17 AM UTC

amarant wrote: post #514

I had Claude build a private podcast station for me. It integrated with Gemini to create a script for the show, based on a topic of my choosing, each talking segment ends with a presentation of the next song, which is played via Spotify, and is selected to have some sort of tie-in with the previous discussion. A tts model generates audio files based on the script, and a playlist is generated to play local file audio…

Wow, I am very interested to see how this works

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

#519

Post by mattmanser » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 7:18 AM UTC

LouisSayers wrote: post #371

williamdclt wrote: post #285

Earlier 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.

I find it's a huge boost for my day-to-day work. If you work on architecture and Claude docs, then you can essentially just have it fill in the gaps. Work then mostly becomes a matter of defining what the next piece of functionality is (which you can also use Claude to help with). The stuff that used to take days now takes hours. It's not perfect, but if you get your codebase into a good shape then the payoff is huge…

I re-read something I did 6 months ago doing this.

It's so obviously AI and had much less value than I thought now I look at it with fresh eyes.

Worse it doesn't read like I wrote it, I don't recognize myself in the doc.

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

#520

Post by kstrauser » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 7:20 AM UTC

gregsadetsky wrote: post #507

lobf wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, what does POC mean in this context? I don’t see an earlier combination of words for which that would be an initialism.

proof of concept

Yep. It's the term for basically a demonstration of a claim. "Huh, this part of the program code looks like it's vulnerable to a buffer overflow, so I'll write a script designed to get the malicious data into the right place inside the programs dataflow pathway to prove that it's actually vulnerable."

You can have a perfectly legitimate, critical vulnerability without providing a working POC. However, then it's up to debate. "Is it really a problem? Is it even possible to sneak the payload past the various checks to get it into position? Hmm, it's hart to tell... perhaps it isn't." But show up with a working POC and it's hard to argue that it's not a real vulnerability. "I don't think that's actually reachable." "Boom, crash." "Oh. I guess it is."