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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?

#541
post #175

Actually seems absurdly simple now, but sometime last year I was trying to figure out what I'd need to tow my daughter's car cross country with my truck: what are the trailer/dolly options, what do they cost, can my truck actually tow the combined weight, etc. I started out prompting ChatGPT kinda how I would with Google, one small prompt at a time, asking about various details. But after one or two of those I just t…

Fascinating; you used a non-deterministic tool - one that disclaims its own accuracy - to calculate critical information that could result in serious damages or physical injury? Did you like, double-check the results?

One must imagine how many claims have been denied by insurance companies for doing something like this...

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

#542

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…

So I'm scrolling through this Ask HN and this is now the 3rd similar problem. Would you mind adding more details as well as the patch? Perhaps as a gist if it's unfinished? I mean just googled https://www.google.com/search?q=kodi+crash+chromecast+4k I'm getting really a lot of issues such as https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=381239 It seems to be a quite common problem. Are you sure it was the rube goldberg fi…

Here's the draft PR: https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/28404

And yes, it correctly diagnosed the problem - I confirmed this morning. The cache had been partially deleted (exactly like it said) and the patched version of the software automatically detected this and rebuilt the cache rather than crashing. This was using the initial version of the patch from commit 1 of the PR.

I then talked with Claude a bit to come up with a less hacky solution that doesn't require constant cache rebuilding, and it suggested writing the "cache" to no_backup, bypassing the cache trimmer. However, this required rebuilding the .so via NDK, so it spun up a full VM in multipass, installed all the tools in there to build the fully patched APK, and built it (the VM was my suggestion, it was about to just brew install everything and mess with my local dev environment).

You can read the full log here, it's nuts: https://github.com/user-attachments/files/28659274/2026-06-0...

I think the key takeaway from this experience (and a few others recently) is that Claude Code works much, much better when you explicitly instruct it to test against real data.

Had I simply described the issue and asked it to think up a solution it likely would have just navel-gazed and then come up with a wrong solution. But by pointing it at a real working environment and actively encouraging it to get its hands dirty, it found the actual solution rapidly - in spite of the fact that I gave it wrong information twice.

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

#543
post #58

ChatGPT Code Interpreter back in ~March 2023. I uploaded a CSV file (of police incidents in San Francisco) and watched it load that into Pandas, show me some charts, then export the data to a SQLite database file for me to download. I write software for data journalists and this new thing appeared to be able to do everything I wanted my software to do just as an unplanned side effect of having the ability to run Pyth…

https://brownstone.org/articles/since-lockdowns-a-12-gdp-los...

here's an example of Spanish journalist using AI to analyze US inflation data properly.

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

#545

For me it was right at the beginning. They said it was a dungeon game. It would describe a room, etc, and I would take some action. But I thought that this dungeon was built in some intricate database. But then I told it that I wanted to leave, got to an inn, where I flirted with the bar waitress, and soon we were watching the sunset in some meadow. As cheesy as that was, it was then that I went "oh shit" this is a m…

> But then I told it that I wanted to leave, got to an inn, where I flirted with the bar waitress, and soon we were watching the sunset in some meadow.

Immediate Silicon Valley vibes: https://youtu.be/S8MAV9jhf04?t=18

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

#546
I asked it how to configure haproxy, a tool that I had heard in passing about, and it gave me back exact working configuration syntax for my use case. Today that seems very mundane, but first time that happened, and I didn't have to google, read docs, or worst case sift through code, that blew my mind.

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

#547
its yet to happen still for real.

every now and again i will try some AI vibe coding stuff. I will be amazed, its a fun high to ride. Until you look at the code and realize you've just made a big messy sketch of things and you can spend the next 2 years building the thing properly.

The most Oh Shit moment i think ive had so far is realizing often i reply to people online which are actually AI. A lot of obvious but there's also quite a lot out there who have become well at blending in.

I wonder how many people get emotionally triggered for instance by AI replies because they think they are human. Then get the idea there's really humans like that out there

Its really easy to whip up like 200k followers who all agree with you on everything, it costs less and less time and money to do so.

To me thats a big risk regardless of what cool stuff you can do with it. Its really tricky one to mitigate too.

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

#548

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

I'm not at my computer atm, but I'll publish my code when I am and let you know!

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

#549
First one for me was when chatGPT wrote me a function that I could paste into my code. It didn't do anything particularly clever but it did things I could figure out without me having to figure them out. That was about two years ago.

Second was last year when Antigravity could build a game mechanics prototype for me in HTML and I could talk to it both about the code and about the project domain and it understood what I'm referring to pretty perfectly.

Third was this year where I noticed Kilocode with Chinese models can do a pretty complicated piece of software for me that did commercially useful things in the domain of models finetunning, just from my description, even though I was very new to the domain. It obviously knew more than I did and could apply the knowledge.

Another one was when switching to Codex (gpt-5.4) immediately solved a problem in a logic heavy library that Glm-5.1 was building for me and had a lot of trouble getting last few tests to pass. This made me realize that even though I'm having trouble seeing it the models skill still progresses rapidly.

I'm getting new ones pretty much every couple of days now. Just yesterday Codex finished for me a rust project that I built 3 years ago that was searching for mathematical proofs in the domain of axiomatic logic. To build it and make it find the proof I was interested in I had to pretty much muster all of my programming prowess and once I found the solution the complexities and drudgery of actually reconstructing the proof from the found path to it and printing it out discouraged me that enough I haven't touched it since then. Codex looked at it and took it in stride. Did the proof reconstruction and printing pretty much in one prompt. Without me explaining anything about the project or the code. Then we went together on a little adventure proving whatever we could en masse after codex optimized the crap out of my old code (both algorithmically and technically). Something I wouldn't bother because that would normally take weeks or rather months of my time. With codex I had all this fun in one afternoon. And that was the third amazing thing Codex built me that day.

As for panic, I find an ocean of joy in everything LLM related. I had only one brief moment of uneasiness few days ago when I realized how much gpt-5.5 can do and thought ... damn ... if it was malicious, I'd be so screwed (along with the rest of humanity probably) ...

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