5 ms·

The marketing is clearly effecting individual developers, too. There's a mass psychosis happening

verdverm 8mo ago
Ai psychosis or ai++ psychosis?
dgxyz 8mo ago
I think this is reality. None of our much-promoted AI initiatives have resulted in any ROI. In fact they have cost a pile of cash so far and delivered nothing.
- noosphr 8mo ago
  After spending nearly 5 years building software which uses AI agents on the back end I've come to the conclusion it's the PC revolution part 2. Productivity gains won't show up on economic data and companies trying to automate everything will fail. But the average office worker will end up with a much more pleasant job and will need to know how to use the models, just like who they needed to learn to use a PC.
  - Ancalagon 8mo ago
    Are these botted comments or just sarcasm?
- co_king_5 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - Ancalagon 8mo ago
    Are these botted comments or just sarcasm?
    - co_king_5 8mo ago
      [dead]
      - nosianu 8mo ago
        It's unclear if you are merely joking or whatever you are actually doing here. Your comments don't say much of anything. People here reward and want useful comments that take the discussion seriously. If you don't, what are you doing here commenting nothingburgers? YOU are the one writing short substance-free complaint-only comments, complaining about other people. That said, a well-reasoned text should probably go on a blog site, not here, or here only as link. Otherwise you are wasting a lot of effort, with only few people even noticing your comment and the discussion soon entirely disappearing into history.
      - Ancalagon 8mo ago
        Honestly I couldn’t tell - didn’t mean to offend. There were just two comments in a row saying essentially the same sarcastic thing about using a 3 year old tech for the last 5+ years
    - surgical_fire 8mo ago
      It's just like in Crypto days. Back then, whenever there was a thread discussing the merits of Crypto, there would be people speaking of the certainty that it was the future and fiat currency was on its way out. It's the same shit with AI. In part it's why I am tranquil about it. The disconnect in between what AI shills say and the reality of using it on a daily basis tell me what I need to know.
      - dgxyz 8mo ago
        That's why my account is so new. Zealot hordes. I grow tired and walk away from HN. Not sure why I keep coming back. I remember when everyone was reading SICP and Clojure and Blockchain were going to burn the universe to the ground. Then crypto. Now this. Been around much longer than HN and watched this cycle so many times it's boring. I'm still writing C.
  - AstroBen 8mo ago
    thanks for your insightful contribution
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
- molsongolden 8mo ago
  Many AI initiatives have had massive ROI though. The implementation problems are similar to any pre-AI tech rollout and hugely expensive non-AI tech implementations fail all the time.
  - dgxyz 8mo ago
    Name one that has at least $200mn ROI over capital investment. Show me the balance sheet for it as well. And make sure that ROI isn't from suddenly not paying salaries.
mjr00 8mo ago
Maybe. I'm actually a big fan of Claude/Codex and use them extensively. The author of the article says the same. > To be clear: I like and use AI when it comes to coding, and even for other tasks. I think it’s been very effective at increasing my productivity—not as effective as the influencers claim it should be, but effective nonetheless. It's hard to get measured opinions. The most vocal opinions online are either "I used 15 AI agents to vibe code my startup, developers are obsolete" or "AI is completely useless." My guess is that most developers (who have tried AI) have an opinion somewhere between these two extremes, you just don't hear them because that's not how the social media world works.
- surgical_fire 8mo ago
  I use both Claude and Codex (Claude at work, Codex at home). They are fine, moderately useful here and there in terms of speeding up some of my tasks. I wouldn't pay much more than 20 bucks for it though.
- dgxyz 8mo ago
  Well I've just watched two major projects fail which were running mostly on faith because someone read too many "I used 15 AI agents to vibe code..." blog posts and sold it to management. The promoters have a deep technical understanding of the problem domain we have but little understanding of what an LLM can achieve or what it can understand relating to the problem at hand. Yes you can indeed vibe code a startup. But try building on that or doing anything relatively complicated and you're up shit creek. There's literally no one out there doing that in the influencer-sphere. It's all about the initial cut and MVP of a project, not the ongoing story. The next failure is replacing a 20 year old legacy subsystem with 3MLOC with a new React / microservices thing. This has been sold to the directors as something we can do in 3 months with Claude. Project failure number three. The only reality is no one learns or is accountable for their mistakes.
  - LouisSayers 8mo ago
    > I've just watched two major projects fail This is an opportunity. You can have a good long career consulting/contracting for these types of companies.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
co_king_5 8mo ago
[dead]
- coldtea 8mo ago
  That the targets also get almost religious about the product
crystal_revenge 8mo ago
> There's a mass psychosis happening There absolutely is but I'm increasingly realizing that it's futile to fight it. The thing that surprises me is that people are simultaneously losing their minds over AI agents while almost no one is exploring playing around with what these models can really do. Even if you restrict yourself to small, open models, there is so much unexplored around messing with the internals of these. The entire world of open image/video generation is pretty much ignored by all but a very narrow niche of people, but has so much potential for creating interesting stuff. Even restricting yourself only to an API endpoint, isn't there something more clever we can be doing than re-implementing code that already exists on github badly through vibe coding? But nobody in the hype-fueled mind rot part of this space remotely cares about anything real being done with gen AI. Vague posting about your billion agent setup and how you've almost entered a new reality is all that matters.
- AstroBen 8mo ago
  There's a good reason for that. The end result of exploring what they can actually do isn't very exciting or marketable "I shipped code 15% faster with AI this month" doesn't have the pull of a 47 agent setup on a mac mini
- svara 8mo ago
  Yes, it's been odd to observe the parallels with the web3 craze. You asked people what their project was for and you'd get a response that made sense to no one outside of that bubble, and if you pressed on people would get mad. The bizarre thing is that this time around, these tools do have a bunch of real utility, but it's become almost impossible online to discuss how to use the tech properly, because that would require acknowledging some limitations.
  - crystal_revenge 8mo ago
    Very similar to web3! On paper the web3 craze sounded very exciting: yes, I absolutely would love an alternate web of truly decentralized services. I've been pretty consistently skeptical of the crypto world, but with web3 I was really hoping to be wrong. What's wild is there was not a single, truly distributed, interesting/useful service at all to come out of all that hype. I spent a fair bit of time diving into the details of Ethereum and very quickly realized the "world computer" there (again, wonderful idea) wasn't really feasible for anything practical (I mean other than creating clever ways to scam people). Right now in the LLM space I see a lot of people focused on building old things in new ways. I've realized that not only do very few people work with local models (where they can hack around and customize more), a surprisingly small number of people write code that even calls an LLM through an API for some specific task that previously wasn't possible (regular ol'software build using calls to an LLM has loads of potential). It's still largely "can some variation on a chat bot do this thing I used to do for me". As a contrast, in the early web, plenty of people were hosting their own website, and messing around with all the basic tools available to see what novel thing they could create. I mean "Hamster Dance" was it's own sort of slop, but the first time you say it you engaged with it. Snarg.net still stands out as novel in it's experiments with "what is an interface".
thefilmore 8mo ago
> There's a mass psychosis happening Any guesses on how long this lasts?
- AstroBen 8mo ago
  Best guess: a few months and it'll spread through dev communities that the effect is a lot more modest than the extreme claims are making it out to be 6-12 months before non-technical leaders take notice and realize they can't actually fire half their team
- layer8 8mo ago
  Until VC money runs out, probably.
- bandrami 8mo ago
  It will last as long as the money hose is pointed towards it

Ai psychosis or ai++ psychosis?

dgxyz 8mo ago

I think this is reality. None of our much-promoted AI initiatives have resulted in any ROI. In fact they have cost a pile of cash so far and delivered nothing.

noosphr 8mo ago
After spending nearly 5 years building software which uses AI agents on the back end I've come to the conclusion it's the PC revolution part 2. Productivity gains won't show up on economic data and companies trying to automate everything will fail. But the average office worker will end up with a much more pleasant job and will need to know how to use the models, just like who they needed to learn to use a PC.
- Ancalagon 8mo ago
  Are these botted comments or just sarcasm?
co_king_5 8mo ago
[flagged]
- Ancalagon 8mo ago
  Are these botted comments or just sarcasm?
  - co_king_5 8mo ago
    [dead]
    - nosianu 8mo ago
      It's unclear if you are merely joking or whatever you are actually doing here. Your comments don't say much of anything. People here reward and want useful comments that take the discussion seriously. If you don't, what are you doing here commenting nothingburgers? YOU are the one writing short substance-free complaint-only comments, complaining about other people. That said, a well-reasoned text should probably go on a blog site, not here, or here only as link. Otherwise you are wasting a lot of effort, with only few people even noticing your comment and the discussion soon entirely disappearing into history.
    - Ancalagon 8mo ago
      Honestly I couldn’t tell - didn’t mean to offend. There were just two comments in a row saying essentially the same sarcastic thing about using a 3 year old tech for the last 5+ years
  - surgical_fire 8mo ago
    It's just like in Crypto days. Back then, whenever there was a thread discussing the merits of Crypto, there would be people speaking of the certainty that it was the future and fiat currency was on its way out. It's the same shit with AI. In part it's why I am tranquil about it. The disconnect in between what AI shills say and the reality of using it on a daily basis tell me what I need to know.
    - dgxyz 8mo ago
      That's why my account is so new. Zealot hordes. I grow tired and walk away from HN. Not sure why I keep coming back. I remember when everyone was reading SICP and Clojure and Blockchain were going to burn the universe to the ground. Then crypto. Now this. Been around much longer than HN and watched this cycle so many times it's boring. I'm still writing C.
- AstroBen 8mo ago
  thanks for your insightful contribution
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
molsongolden 8mo ago
Many AI initiatives have had massive ROI though. The implementation problems are similar to any pre-AI tech rollout and hugely expensive non-AI tech implementations fail all the time.
- dgxyz 8mo ago
  Name one that has at least $200mn ROI over capital investment. Show me the balance sheet for it as well. And make sure that ROI isn't from suddenly not paying salaries.

mjr00 8mo ago

Maybe. I'm actually a big fan of Claude/Codex and use them extensively. The author of the article says the same. > To be clear: I like and use AI when it comes to coding, and even for other tasks. I think it’s been very effective at increasing my productivity—not as effective as the influencers claim it should be, but effective nonetheless. It's hard to get measured opinions. The most vocal opinions online are either "I used 15 AI agents to vibe code my startup, developers are obsolete" or "AI is completely useless." My guess is that most developers (who have tried AI) have an opinion somewhere between these two extremes, you just don't hear them because that's not how the social media world works.

surgical_fire 8mo ago
I use both Claude and Codex (Claude at work, Codex at home). They are fine, moderately useful here and there in terms of speeding up some of my tasks. I wouldn't pay much more than 20 bucks for it though.
dgxyz 8mo ago
Well I've just watched two major projects fail which were running mostly on faith because someone read too many "I used 15 AI agents to vibe code..." blog posts and sold it to management. The promoters have a deep technical understanding of the problem domain we have but little understanding of what an LLM can achieve or what it can understand relating to the problem at hand. Yes you can indeed vibe code a startup. But try building on that or doing anything relatively complicated and you're up shit creek. There's literally no one out there doing that in the influencer-sphere. It's all about the initial cut and MVP of a project, not the ongoing story. The next failure is replacing a 20 year old legacy subsystem with 3MLOC with a new React / microservices thing. This has been sold to the directors as something we can do in 3 months with Claude. Project failure number three. The only reality is no one learns or is accountable for their mistakes.
- LouisSayers 8mo ago
  > I've just watched two major projects fail This is an opportunity. You can have a good long career consulting/contracting for these types of companies.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

co_king_5 8mo ago

[dead]

coldtea 8mo ago
That the targets also get almost religious about the product

crystal_revenge 8mo ago

> There's a mass psychosis happening There absolutely is but I'm increasingly realizing that it's futile to fight it. The thing that surprises me is that people are simultaneously losing their minds over AI agents while almost no one is exploring playing around with what these models can really do. Even if you restrict yourself to small, open models, there is so much unexplored around messing with the internals of these. The entire world of open image/video generation is pretty much ignored by all but a very narrow niche of people, but has so much potential for creating interesting stuff. Even restricting yourself only to an API endpoint, isn't there something more clever we can be doing than re-implementing code that already exists on github badly through vibe coding? But nobody in the hype-fueled mind rot part of this space remotely cares about anything real being done with gen AI. Vague posting about your billion agent setup and how you've almost entered a new reality is all that matters.

AstroBen 8mo ago
There's a good reason for that. The end result of exploring what they can actually do isn't very exciting or marketable "I shipped code 15% faster with AI this month" doesn't have the pull of a 47 agent setup on a mac mini
svara 8mo ago
Yes, it's been odd to observe the parallels with the web3 craze. You asked people what their project was for and you'd get a response that made sense to no one outside of that bubble, and if you pressed on people would get mad. The bizarre thing is that this time around, these tools do have a bunch of real utility, but it's become almost impossible online to discuss how to use the tech properly, because that would require acknowledging some limitations.
- crystal_revenge 8mo ago
  Very similar to web3! On paper the web3 craze sounded very exciting: yes, I absolutely would love an alternate web of truly decentralized services. I've been pretty consistently skeptical of the crypto world, but with web3 I was really hoping to be wrong. What's wild is there was not a single, truly distributed, interesting/useful service at all to come out of all that hype. I spent a fair bit of time diving into the details of Ethereum and very quickly realized the "world computer" there (again, wonderful idea) wasn't really feasible for anything practical (I mean other than creating clever ways to scam people). Right now in the LLM space I see a lot of people focused on building old things in new ways. I've realized that not only do very few people work with local models (where they can hack around and customize more), a surprisingly small number of people write code that even calls an LLM through an API for some specific task that previously wasn't possible (regular ol'software build using calls to an LLM has loads of potential). It's still largely "can some variation on a chat bot do this thing I used to do for me". As a contrast, in the early web, plenty of people were hosting their own website, and messing around with all the basic tools available to see what novel thing they could create. I mean "Hamster Dance" was it's own sort of slop, but the first time you say it you engaged with it. Snarg.net still stands out as novel in it's experiments with "what is an interface".

thefilmore 8mo ago

> There's a mass psychosis happening Any guesses on how long this lasts?

AstroBen 8mo ago
Best guess: a few months and it'll spread through dev communities that the effect is a lot more modest than the extreme claims are making it out to be 6-12 months before non-technical leaders take notice and realize they can't actually fire half their team
layer8 8mo ago
Until VC money runs out, probably.
bandrami 8mo ago
It will last as long as the money hose is pointed towards it