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

You don't need to actually reinstall to fix this. You can boot to single user mode and then you're root. Fix the permissions from there.

Even if you've accidentally removed permission from chmod itself, you can use the linker trick to fix that (your LLM can explain that one but use a fresh context so it's not roleplaying where it doesn't know how to fix without a reinstall)

I did write a android app for my SO, rather over engineered - but I had fun programming it and SO uses the app daily. The thing is, the app was in ReactNative and I didn't regularly update the codebase with current ReactNative versions so, to get the app running on a newer Android version I had to either go through the pain of updating the app or rewrite it. I didn't really have the time and energy to rewrite it. So a few weeks ago I just gave it a shot and provided Claude Code with a few screenshots, description of functionality and it basically one shot the whole app. Now I am building new features SO was missing and currently also developing a backend.

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Yup. ChatGPT has become Chat General Contractor at my house. I am moderately handy. But talking through a project with an llm before I start it has been great at helping me evaluate its difficulty level, rough estimate of how long it will take, to dos and not to dos, and helping me get unstuck or fix a mistake.

And frankly its convinced me several times that I should just hire someone to do x instead of trying to do it myself.

The alternative is watching youtube videos which are almost always diy people who try to tell you that you can do everything yourself.

> I honestly don’t understand AI naysayers. I use Claude every day both professionally as a Solution Architect and personally in a variety of projects I simply could not have ever approached alone.

My brother works in wildlife trapping and management. I've been brainstorming and prototyping ESP32 sensors and mechanics for traps and educational devices with him. I probably won't end up doing the work with him, but I want him to see what's possible with my other brother, a machine learning expert.

Nothing has been deployed in the field.

Nothing will be until he and my other brother commit and get proper software risk management policies in place. And legal advice and other support work. And honestly, he's been careful and hasn't pushed for deployment.

He works with rabies. He works in people's neighborhoods. Maybe yours. Do you want me to finally get a Claude Code account created and go wild building shit, or keep reading up on ISA 62443 and other security frameworks and mapping out the risks?

I'm not going to drag LLM generated work into your neighborhood today. Would you honestly want someone else to?

And when people realize this is happening now everywhere and the entire AI industry is fucked, including other machine learning fields that get hit by association?

Then my other brother the fucking Princeton Machine Learning Super Star can't pay for his fucking kids' schooling because of a million people fucking *not understanding* and intelligence agencies taking advantage of it. He's smeared by the broad anti-AI brush.

Then my brother may have to depend on more assistance from law enforcement, legal resources and conservation agencies. Because I didn't have the power to stop the LLM hype machine earlier.

It always would have made sense to have them work with state and federal Wildlife Conservation officers and agencies. Now it feels a little less like watching my brothers build those relationships out of mutual respect for other professionals and more out of need. It feels unequal.

So, I have to put in work today assuring my brothers' clients of tomorrow, who care about their family and kids, that no, their machine learning algorithms won't take their elderly parents medicine and push them down the stairs. It will, with careful review from lawyers and experts, help their kids identify nature in their backyard on their Smart TV. If they want, it will identify the difference between gopher tortoise holes and mole holes, and maybe if they opt-in to a Community of Saving feature, it will let Fish and Wildlife Conservation know there are habitats nearby so we can see how healthy our ecosystem is as a community together, or call their preferred pest eliminator.

That sounds like PR. Because I have to do that extra work today. Because otherwise we aren't just protected by our fellow professionals who care about theie work out there in the field, instead we always need some bigger institution protecting and controlling us.

My brothers are delaying committing resources to projects. That's fine, they have other important priorities, but I keep warning them. And there probably will be an equivalent of the "Video Game Crash of 1983" in 2028 or whatever. And I think if I had had more personal power and been believed I could have done something about that before we had to be protected.