The second I realized it removed nearly all blockers as a bootstrapped technical startup founder.
Claude wiped out the need for web and mobile development resources. I bought a Mac-Mini and had iOS apps up and running in days.
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?
#692Earlier 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
If religion and human technology are any guide, there will be a lot of this but it will never be the entire sum of human activity. Some of us are just too damn curious. We go straight for the curtain. I refuse to believe that very human pattern won’t continue.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#693[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#694I could go on and on, but Claude recently decompiled the firmware of my camper van, documented all the CAN interfaces, then programmed an ESP32 module to talk to the van’s integrated systems (power, HVAC, lighting, tanks). That sort of embedded systems integration is completely out of my wheelhouse. I honestly don’t understand AI naysayers. I use Claude every day both professionally as a Solution Architect and person…
>projects I simply could not have ever approached alone.
Learned helplessness.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#695I tried building a deliberately vague project around managing MCP servers [0]. The purpose was to find what LLMs and agents can do. While the project didn’t reach anywhere I was amazed by how it’s possible to navigate even with no clear direction. The ability of the “glorified auto-complete” system to pull off something this sort was an eye opener for me.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#696“Farewell to stack overflow” juxtaposed with the realization that AI only knows what to troubleshoot and how because of stack overflow…
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#697Mine is just running a model on my laptop. It’s just amazing! I can ask it pretty much any question and it replies relatively FAST!
Before, we lacked advancements in technology because we were limited by hardware. This advancement is the opposite: our software and the math/algorithms have brought us this.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#698Reading a dozen comments here, the AI seems to blow peoples mind most often in domains they're less familiar with. Repairing furnaces, HVAC, towing hitches, camper van interfaces, printer debugging. It wasn't the user's career to do these things, it gave them a bump from very novice to intermediate level.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#699When I tried, just for fun, to put together an MVP of a fully autonomous business, I wanted to see how far it would go, when I got it generally working to around a 30% level I stopped because it was enough to see people would make a concerted effort to build this for real. HN was not impressed, heh: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44143928