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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?

#581

Post by variodot »

For me, it was during an on-going incident in a failing IoT OTA service which was growing in priority; taking two items I was unfamiliar with and bolting together new OTA mechanism via alternative SMS provider. I'd never developed in .NET ecosystem before and happened to gain access to another team's Twilio account in a prior week, so took a shot, planned interfaces to extract and implemented alternative Twilio implementation + feature flag

Normal software instincts plus access to a different service flushed the buildup of OTA's and lives on as a fallback mechanism. Amazed me going from idea to execution faster than I could have ever dreamed of even on-boarding myself to the area or environment.

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

#582

Post by fuckinpuppers »

Cheetah26 wrote: post #288
ssl-3 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty great. (Though that's also the kind of hands-on troubleshooting step/fix that a person could just google for and find pretty easily back before the internet got all fucked up.)

Your parenthetical really describes my experience with AI searches. 5+ years ago I could find most things within one or two quick searches, now it takes so many that of course I'm going to reach for AI because that's the only way to get back to my baseline efficiency.

That’s a great way to summarize. Same

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

#583

Post by Zopieux »

jackdoe wrote: post #560

I have had many, but the last one was quite funny: It fixed my printer after dist-upgrade and separate chrome upgrade, the printer worked everywhere but not in chrome. After 30 years of using linux I didn't even want to know what is wrong, is it colord again? dbus + cups issue? I completely accepted that I wont be able to print from chrome for a couple of months until next update. I just ran it in dangerously-skip-pe…

Don't leave us hanging, what was the issue?

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

#585

Post by MattGaiser »

Zopieux wrote: post #583
jackdoe wrote: post #560

I have had many, but the last one was quite funny: It fixed my printer after dist-upgrade and separate chrome upgrade, the printer worked everywhere but not in chrome. After 30 years of using linux I didn't even want to know what is wrong, is it colord again? dbus + cups issue? I completely accepted that I wont be able to print from chrome for a couple of months until next update. I just ran it in dangerously-skip-pe…

Don't leave us hanging, what was the issue?

The virtue is never having to know for stupid printer crap.

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

#586

Post by ezconnect »

mattmanser wrote: post #504
jzemeocala wrote: post #118

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…

With stuff like this, do you honestly not feel that you've probably been tricked and that someone else actually did this? Don't get me wrong, I think AI can do some surprising things, but with stuff like this, often it just stole the code and the steps without attribution, it didn't figure it out. There'll probably be a blog post detailing exactly how to do this somewhere and Claude just copied the steps and code. An…

It was probably done on a foreign language on an archived forum. Claude is the improvement of the internet search box.

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

#587

Post by franze »

my AI moment was when i was lerne muscles for my YTT and i hacked together a quiz app from my spreadsheet with chatgpt 3.5

damn it was buggy and lots of copy pasting

yeah, i could have coded it myself but i would not have found the time

that was my Eureka moment where I realised this is going to change everything.

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

#588

Post by MattGaiser »

My grandparents had a dishwasher from the 1980s. The contractor they hired to fix it didn’t even know how to take it out of the spot as it had an old design that attached it at the top.

ChatGPT both told me exactly why from the model number (had to disconnect a part), found a new part, and told me step by step how that part would be taken out.

We didn’t end up buying the new part, but it beat the repairman.

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

#590

Post by wiether »

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've been writing code since my teens, I've studied assembly... yet the fact that _things_ start happening when I press the power button on my computer are pure magic to me and I like it this way.

I started digging a few times, but, I prefer the "magic".

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