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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?

#591
There never was one. I'm from computing science field and it's all been and is normal. Amusing, maybe, but normal. Same as before, but in larger scale, with occasional hype. People picking up useful things and using them. Some going insane.

If I had to pick a surprise, I think the music generation works better than I'd have expected at this point. Only better for funk, but still.

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

#592
Not sure, but I can tell you what my "oh s** astroturfing is so bad, it's even in Hacker News" moment. And if I learned GenAI was used to make some of the astroturf, that's more an "ah s*“ than an "oh s*“ thing. I mean, the prominence, ubiquity, and breathlessness. One out of three, sure. Two out of three, maybe. And some corpo shilling definitely happens here. But this is like, well, covering an entire area with artificial grass, to the point where nothing lives. Crazy.

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

#593

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?

I will never know.

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

#594
I had an "oh shit" moment when I used the computer use feature in Codex. There's something eerie about how it can completely control applications in the background with it's own dedicated mouse cursor. Now it can even do it while the computer is locked. Makes me feel like an alien intruding on very own computer, it's Codex's now.

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

#595
The GPT-4 demo. Taking a screenshot of handwritten instructions to build a website, along with a drawing of what the website should look like. Then ChatGPT spit out a working prototype.

Also the live video mode demo later that year.

Then the agentic coding breakthrough in Nov/Dec 2025.

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

#596
I'm a researcher working in theoretical computer science. Chatgpt found a counterexample of some conjecture I've been trying for 2 years. Also, it one shot many problems I've worked on. It also improved some of my work greatly.

I feel quite useless in the sheer brutal proof writing, counterexample generating skill chatgpt is demonstrating, and wonder what would be the future of my profession.

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

#597
Mine was testing out the copilot preview in the early days. Testing how well it knew semi obscure public codebases. Started filling out the first few lines and got the entire document word for word in tab complete.

That was the day I realised the plagiarism potential llms has.

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

#598
I have yet to have such a moment. To me it is still just a compressed database.

Though I am surprised at how these databases turn professionals into amateurs, like when Meta publishes some chatbot that can trivially be queried into sending account resets to any email address or when large corporations just dump their entire secret sauce into some remote SaaS led by obviously kooky people.

It's like established pros and big corps want to experience what it was like to be a self-taught PHP coder in 2007, like some kind of false nostalgia.

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

#599
I had 2 MacBook Pros. One 2024 and one 2019. The 2024 one would connect fine to the internet, the 2019 one would not.

After pasting in the airportd logs of both (into ChatGPT and Gemini) it found it was down to band switching (2.4GHz and 5GHz) through some really old error code.

This fixed a problem that had plagued me for >12 months. Really magical feeling it got in on first try.

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

#600
post #400

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.

While I think this is true > If you use GenAI on things that you couldn't approach alone, it's an incredible tool. I think this isn't true in all cases > 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). I think even then there's a divide. I mostly work greenfield projects (and love it!). For these, AI has been a literal game changer. Our…

How do you use voice-to-text? You mean, in the browser? I am only familiar with Claude Code, which I have installed on remote server, and there obviously, voice-to-text does not work. I have to type, which is tiring.
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