When I got laid off because of it.
Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
821–830 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#822Several. Yesterday a friend with no prior coding experience or knowledge showed me an app he initially built to help him study for public administration job positions. The exams for this positions are public (spain), but the tools are scarce, expensive or he did not like. So he used lovable, then switched to web gemini and claude, then paid claude. He now has +130 very active users on an initial free tier, while he f…
Do your students know their feedback is AI generated?
A pre-AI example from the military : course reviews and performance assessments were changes to be from a set of about 70 descriptors instead of written custom. Instructors could modify them, but many didn't or did so only trivially. The system was junked in within three years because of the obvious: those giving feedback didn't own it, and those receiving feedback didn't value it.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#823I 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.
One trick I've found is that I need to first give the clanker the real problem (in your case, the laptops not connecting) and then give it what I think is wrong. If I start at too low a level, I lose much of the advantage of the tool, which is part rubber ducky, part "did you think to try".
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#824In early 2023, I was debugging an issue in a long abandoned package that used OpenSSL and needed to be fixed for OpenSSL 3. The entire thing was a mess and the parts of OpenSSL it was using are almost entirely undocumented.
Copying a pasting into a ChatGPT window gave me the lines of code to print the error message rather than failing silently. Copying the error message then gave me a detailed explanation of problem and the diff to fix it. I still have no idea where this knowledge came from as I spent a decent amount of time searching and found nothing about this corner of OpenSSL.
I’m very confident it would have taken me a week to make sense of what the package was trying to do and with LLMs it was done in a couple of hours.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#825Earlier 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
"In the distant future, humans live in a computer-aided society and have forgotten the fundamentals of mathematics, including even the rudimentary skill of counting.
The Terrestrial Federation is at war with Deneb, and the war is conducted by long-range weapons controlled by computers which are expensive and hard to replace. Myron Aub, a low grade Technician, discovers how to reverse-engineer the principles of pencil-and-paper arithmetic by studying the workings of ancient computers which were programmed by human beings, before bootstrapping became the norm—a development which is later dubbed "Graphitics"." [1]
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#826How could you not instantly see ChatGPT was absolutely revolutionary the first time you tried it? I was absolutely blown away and I'm sort of still are
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#827I have yet to have one.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#828This video: https://youtu.be/mcYl70vq_Ns?si=ljbc-kWtYBF8o5uk
People really hate AI with a passion and i think the defenders are setting themselves up to become scapegoats for some socisl crisis to come.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#829Very, very early already with GPT-3.
The simple fact that people will act on it and believe just because what they insinuated as a prompt and the answer being churned out on the screen looking somewhat readable.
That alone was going to seed so much discord and reinforce invalid messages, truly "oh shit".
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#830I came back from 6 months of parental leave in march 2026. When I left no one serious was using the tools for more than casual rubber ducking. When I came back my best colleagues were spitting out clauded PRs faster than I could review them, and they were all nice.