I was trying to make an app to detect the note on an ocarina. I was having a bit of pain with it. I asked Claude to research how other apps did it and within 5 minutes after pulling dozens of sites and Wikipedia entries it had it working near perfectly.
Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
871–880 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#872Literally 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…
You know, I've had this exact bug for some time on a Fire Stick 4K Max Gen 1 (similarly anaemic). I figured it was storage or RAM pressure causing the problem as I could see both were close to the limit, but didn't realise it was OS swap/cache eviction removing critical files as it only happened to Kodi. I assumed Kodi just didn't really clean up after itself fully and after a bunch of heavy uses some cruft built up,…
This issue was fixed two months ago. It does indicate you are basically out of storage and may have more problems though. But just updating should resolve the critical files in cache issue.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#873I 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…
>I 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.
Can you tell me a bit more about the firmware/camper van? Has this firmware been decompiled by anyone else?
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#874I tried to see if an LLM service provider could rewrite some legal docs where nothing was hallucinated in order to follow a consistent format to see what may be missing in the document. It could do that. Next, I wanted to see if this could be done with a local LLM. Gemma-4 handles this fine with an 8GB video card and a large context (128k). Next, I wanted to see if the model could also OCR these docs and translate th…
My son is in a lawsuit with his bank where they put through fraudulent charges and wouldn't charge them back then the bank sued him for the money. He is using Claude and Gemini fighting the original lawsuit and now has a counter-suit 100% using AI for everything. He puts it into different AI's to check everything against each other and to come up with more ideas. He started with ChatGPT, moved to Grok, then Claude, b…
Your son is not alone:
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/no-lawyer-no-money-...
https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/06/04/1138391/courts-c...
Good luck to him. I get worried about people using AI for serious work in a field they aren't specialized in, but if it helps him achieve a good outcome, that would be interesting.
I have often felt that the legal system is divided between haves and have-nots: if you can afford to participate, you get "justice" tilted toward you. Easier participation for those without the resources for a lawyer would be good.
The second article I linked, from the MIT Technology Review, is quite interesting. It seems like judges are experiencing some version of what open source maintainers and seniors at companies are experiencing: a much larger review burden due to the cost of generating code or legal arguments dropping drastically.
I wonder what form this structural shift in output versus specialist review capacity will take in other professions. The frontier labs seem to be trying to automate more and more of the "specialist review" process. I am not sure that is feasible in the legal world, but we'll see....
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#875Right after gpt4 came out I asked it to derive a new optimization technique. It ended up using Einstein sum notation to define what I thought was a totally novel optimization setup. It then implemented it in PyTorch and it ran with no bugs. This was the moment that I realized that novel intellectual work might be done by these models and I was shook. I had an oh shit moment with gpt3 too since it was so surprising how well next token prediction works, and at the time I really didn’t think it would pan out so well. I also had a jarring experience discussing computational theory of mind with gpt4, when it applied a rubric we came up with to itself and it claimed its level of consciousness was between an ant and a mouse.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#876Last week I gave Claude Code in Ultracode mode the prompt: "I want a browser-based retro game inspired by Spy Hunter" and gave it the URL to the Spy Hunter (Arcade Game) Wikipedia page. What came out has a lot of problems and needs refinement, but you can definitely see a lot of elements of Spy Hunter in there. I haven't worked on any refinements yet, because I've been low on tokens this week, but for the first thing…
Just played for 15 min, haha, thanks!
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#877Right after gpt4 came out I asked it to derive a new optimization technique. It ended up using Einstein sum notation to define what I thought was a totally novel optimization setup. It then implemented it in PyTorch and it ran with no bugs. This was the moment that I realized that novel intellectual work might be done by these models and I was shook. I had an oh shit moment with gpt3 too since it was so surprising ho…
> realized that novel intellectual work might be done by these models and I was shook.
I suspected it was more likely that the intellectual work had already been done in a similar way by a number of other people, and GPT-4 picked up that work.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#878For 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…
Was this AI Dungeon? If I recall correctly, it was popular as a way to access GPT-3 which wasn't available publicly.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#879My personal "oh shit" moment was in 2015, when this paper came out:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.05869
It showed me that a model trained only on movie subtitles data exhibited some (very primitive) reasoning. I have been working on Deep Learning and later LLMs ever since.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#880[flagged]