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

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

#621

Post by bityard » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 10:57 AM UTC

buckle8017 wrote: post #201

andrewthornton wrote: post #77

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…

Gemini almost killed you. The exhaust blower not working triggered a safety that prevented the furnace from firing. Spinning it bypassed the safety. You likely inhaled a lot more carbon monoxide than you know.

None of what you said is actually how furnaces work.

"Spinning it to bypass the safety" is not a thing.

Please don't spread FUD.

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

#622

Post by luckystarr » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 10:58 AM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #508

doctorwho42 wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe because the scale of investment out strips the value? What trillion dollar problem is AI solving?

If you're going to put it that way, companies, globally, spend something on the order of $20 trillion on office workers. If corporations didn't have to spend that money on them, and everything else in order to support them, they wouldn't.

Then the workers wouldn't spend 20 trillion and the economy as a whole would tank.

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

#623

Post by dekoidal » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 10:58 AM UTC

When I read that Microsoft gave OpenAI billions of dollars worth of data centre access and OpenAI accounted for it as billions of dollars worth of investment. When they spent the tokens Microsoft accounted for it as billions of dollars worth of income. Both companies gained billions of dollars with mad up money

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

#624

Post by tomduncalf » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 10:59 AM UTC

notagoodidea wrote: post #241

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…

I would be interested to learn a bit more on the how after reading also [0] and the worlk done on patching the Ableton Move firmware with the Schwung [1]. Slightly different but there is an increasing amount of work done on either old hardware and new one exploring patching, swapping or developing new firmware from scratch thanks to LLM/GenAI currently. [0] https://mforney.org/blog/2026-05-28-patching-my-guitar-amps-…

Schwung is great. See also the recent new firmware for the Elektron Monomachine (old unsupported hardware) created using LLMs

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

#625

Post by bthallplz » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 11:06 AM UTC

jorl17 wrote: post #400

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.

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…

Yay for dictation! It's so nice to just think aloud and then have an easily editable record of your thoughts, even when you aren't feeding the outputs to LLMs.

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

#626

Post by p0w3n3d » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 11:08 AM UTC

awbvious wrote: post #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 a…

TIL what astroturfing is. Moreover I now understand that it is almost impossible to tell the robots from the people in the internet

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

#627

Post by abyssin » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 11:08 AM UTC

I watched a friend generate a 10 pages report based on multiple documents, including scientific papers, and it was almost flawless. It would have taken me days.

A milder version of it was Copilot setting up an environment for a Jupyter notebook. What would have been annoying back and forth between googling and docs went like a breeze.

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

#628

Post by lukan » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 11:15 AM UTC

2 years ago I played a bit with the abandoned source of

https://www.wickeditor.com

a flash like editor for the web, that I found promising.

But doing it manual, was too much work, outdated and broken build pipeline, stuck on an older node version, deprecated and abandoned dependencies .. so I stopped the experiment.

Then I gave it a try with claude beginning of this year. I remember not expecting anything, but did a bit of steering the direction as I knew the source a bit and let it mostly work on its own - and then it said it is done and it works.

I didn't believe it, but it did. "Can you add this feature?" Yes it could.

Since that experience, I have a hard time taking people serious, who say AI is useless.

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

#629

Post by tempoponet » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 11:24 AM UTC

I can actually use and enjoy Linux. The "year of the desktop" never came for me, but instead I got the "year of the cli".

For 20 years I've used Linux in one form or another, but I've felt like I was kneecapped for the most basic things. Just trying to plug in an external drive or a second display meant hours of stack overflow and pasting commands I didn't understand.

Now I'm using several Linux machines for Steam, NAS, local LLM, development, and what used to derail a weekend project now amounts to a coffee break while Claude figures it out.

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

#630

Post by VortexLain » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 11:25 AM UTC

Starting with the days of Siri, i've been evaluating all chatbots of that nature by writing them a meaningless string of text and seeing how they answer. GPT-3 was the first system which instead of refusing to answer or answering meaninglessly has identified that the string of text has no sense.