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I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis
https://xcancel.com/mitchellh/status/2055380239711457578 https://xcancel.com/mitchellh/status/2055380239711457578
https://hachyderm.io/@mitchellh/116580433508108130 https://hachyderm.io/@mitchellh/116580433508108130
- andreasgl 5mo agohttps://xcancel.com/mitchellh/status/2055380239711457578 https://xcancel.com/mitchellh/status/2055380239711457578
- mhitza 5mo agohttps://hachyderm.io/@mitchellh/116580433508108130 https://hachyderm.io/@mitchellh/116580433508108130
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- teddyh 5mo ago<https://twiiit.com/mitchellh/status/2055380239711457578 https://twiiit.com/mitchellh/status/2055380239711457578> – will redirect to a currently-working Nitter instance.
- autoexec 5mo agoSeems broken. It just throws up an anime cat girl for me.
- slopinthebag 5mo ago> anime cat girl seems like it's working ideally to me!
- autoexec 5mo agoWait, are you calling me a bot, or are you just into anime cat girls?
- slopinthebag 5mo agoim not calling you a bot lol
- treyd 5mo agoAnubis is actually a jackal.
- autoexec 5mo agoI stand corrected!
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- weinzierl 5mo ago"its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" Hmm, I agree with the point OP is making, but I'm not so sure this is the best supporting argument. The bottleneck is finding the bugs and if he'd criticized people saying AI will be the panacea to that I'd be with him, but people saying agents are fast and good at fixing human found bugs is nothing I'd object to. Agents are fixing bugs so quickly and at a scale humans can't do already.
- woeirua 5mo ago[flagged]
- maxbond 5mo agoMore likely people thought GP was missing the point; "MTTR-optimized YOLO deployment" only succeeds against recoverable errors and acceptable periods of downtime against errors that are detected quickly. You could have a bug silently corrupting data for months, and that data may only be used by 1 critical process that runs once every quarter. So you could introduce a timebomb that can't be gracefully recovered from (depending on the nature of the data corruption). So the point is not that agents cannot find bugs (they certainly can), it's whether you can shirk reviewing for bugs if MTTR is fast enough. There are circumstances where YOLO is appropriate, but they aren't the production environment of a mature application.
- weinzierl 5mo agoI don't think I missed the point, that is why I said I agree with the general point (and with what you said in your comment). What I wanted to say is that the particular people that think "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" are not the best argument for it. But I won't die on this hill, maybe I'm just reading the sentence differently then others.
- maxbond 5mo ago
- tacostakohashi 5mo ago"no no, it has full test coverage" at least at my BigCo, AI is being used for everything - writing slop, writing tests, code reviews, etc. it would make sense to use AI for writing code, but human code review. or, human code, but AI test cases... or whatever combination of cross-checking, trust-but-verify, human in the loop, etc. people prefer. i think once it gets used for everything, people have lost the plot, it's the inmates running the asylum.
- ares623 5mo agoI was rewatching Rich Hickey's "Simple Made Easy" talk (as one does) and there was a great line about full test coverage. "What's true about all bugs in production? (pause for dramatic effect) They all passed the tests!" (well, he said typechecker but I think the point stands)
- robotswantdata 5mo agoMost labs are shilling “AI worker” dreams to these very companies
- nialse 5mo agoI'm starting to long for the age after AI. When the generative euphoria has settled and all outputs are formally verified based on exquisite architectures and standards.
- senordevnyc 5mo agoWill never happen, for the exact reason that we’ve almost never done that for human output either.
- sitkack 5mo agoit is required now, or all civilization collapses.
- platinumrad 5mo agoYou're going to have to expand on this one.
- dghlsakjg 5mo agoThey are expressing the idea that AI is so effective that it will make human work redundant necessitating a decoupling of resource allocation as a reward for performing work. I don’t agree, but that’s the thinking
- sitkack 5mo agoNo, that quality drops so low across the board due to flaws in AI coding that they only way to address all these flaws is to have mechanically checked proofs that the code actually works.
- dghlsakjg 5mo agoMy reply was meant for another tangent. No idea how it ended up on this thread. Whoops
- senordevnyc 5mo agoAssuming he’s right, I don’t see how that constitutes “psychosis”, as opposed to this beyond yet another of a billion examples of companies jumping on a bandwagon / cargo cult, and then learning they took it too far. And also, he might not be right. But the good news is, we’ll all get to find out together!
- CodingJeebus 5mo agoAnyone who's taken VC funding has no choice. More money has been spent on AI commercialization than the atomic bomb, the US interstate build-out, the ISS and the Apollo program combined. Failure is going to be catastrophic and therefore, one tied to this ship cannot accept a world in which it fails.
- infamouscow 5mo agoOn the bright side, my guillotine & rope startup is going to make a killing (no pun intended).
- hungryhobbit 5mo agoOr anyone who even wants VC funding. 90+% of investors only want to invest in AI companies. If you're not doing AI there's an incredibly limited pool of people who will give you $$$ ... and you're competing with EVERY OTHER NON-AI COMPANY for their attention.
- LunicLynx 5mo agoEither this or we humans are out of the picture soon.
- arm32 5mo agoOccams' razor would assume the former.
- leeoniya 5mo ago> "no no, it has full test coverage" i don't have enough fingers (and toes) to count how many times i've demonstrated that "100% coverage" is almost universally bullshit.
- kevinsync 5mo agoCodex is freakin hot-to-trot to churn out test coverage for every single thing it implements, and some of it is very esoteric and highly prescriptive (regexes for days) BUT .. after a while, it dawned on me that LLM-driven test coverage is less about proving “code correctness” (you’re better off writing those tests yourself alongside them), and more about just trying to ensure that whatever gets bolted on stays bolted on. For better or worse, obviously, since if you bolt on trash, trash you shall have.
- throw310822 5mo agoWholeheartedly agree, but in fairness, I trust the tests of the best AI models more than those of the average human developer. There's a lot of people around that combine high diligence with complete intellectual laziness, producing tons of useless tests. Actually no, cancel that. I realise now that I trust AIs more than the average developer, period. At this point they do produce better code than most people I've dealt with.
- GrumpyYoungMan 5mo agoThere's a very old paper by Cem Kaner about the meaninglessness of "100% coverage" where he included an appendix where he enumerates 101 different possible types of code coverage: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/243782285_Software_Negligence_Testing_Coverage https://www.researchgate.net/publication/243782285_Software_...
- woeirua 5mo agoThis doesn’t constitute AI psychosis. His argument is that we need to retain understanding of the systems we use, but there’s no compelling argument as to why that is the case. (I get that people are going to be offended by that statement, but agents are already better than the average software engineer. I don’t see why we need to fight this, except for economic insecurity caused by mass layoffs.) It all just feels like horse drawn carriage operators trying to convince automobile drivers to stop driving.
- caconym_ 5mo agoI am sure you will feel that this is missing the point of your analogy, but we would not have gotten very far with automobiles if we didn't know how they worked.
- throw310822 5mo agoYou are breaking the analogy because automobiles are machines for transportation, and understanding them is important to make them move. LLMs are machines to understand, and well, if they do the understanding you don't need to.
- caconym_ 5mo agoThe thing we're worried about not understanding here is the software the LLMs write, not the LLMs themselves. The direct analogy to automobiles would be for each automobile to be a oneoff design filled with bad and bizarre decisions, excessively redundant parts, insane routing of wires, lines, ducts, etc., generally poor serviceability, and so on. IMO the big question going forward is whether the consistent availability of LLMs can render these kinds of post-delivery issues moot (they will reliably [catch and] fix problems in the software they wrote before any real damage is caused), or whether human reliance on LLMs and abdication of understanding will just make software worse because LLMs' ability to fix their own mistakes, and the consequences thereof, generally breaks down in the same contexts/complexities where they made those mistakes in the first place. My own observations are that moderately complex software written in the mode of "vibe coding" or "agentic engineering" tends to regress to barely-functional dogshit as features are piled on, and that once this state is reached, the teams behind it are unable to, or perhaps simply uninterested in, unfuck[ing] it. I have stopped using software that has gone down this path, not because I have some philosophical objection to it, but because it has become _literally unusable_. But you will certainly not catch me claiming to know what the future holds.
- miek 5mo agoMy very large employer has always been glacially slow on modernization and tech adoption. It may now, oddly enough, become a competitive advantage.
- DCKP 5mo agoLiterally the plot of Battlestar Galactica! Life imitates art indeed...
- Barrin92 5mo agoyes, I was never so happy to work in Germany. People used to joke about the proverbial fax machine still being a thing but I've never been so glad to work in a culture where this mania doesn't exist. Reading HN is like entering Alice's Wonderland of token maxxers and AI psychotics. Genuinely don't know a single person here who is forced to work like this.
- alexnewman 5mo agoAh so it's like 2000 again. Germany will go even farther behind it seems
- elevation 5mo agoMitchell aches because his career has been solving broadly scoped problems by building a collection of thoughtful primitives for others to extend. LLMs seem to do the opposite but at great speed, and it hurts to watch.
- junofan 5mo agoReading more, it seems part of his point is “if you’re making these primitives, it’s up to adopters to deploy, so mean-time-to-recovery isn’t that relevant.” Which is valid I guess. But equally, like, do people need Terraform if they can just tell codex “put it live”, and does that hurt to see?
- alexdrydew 5mo agoHonestly, I don't get this argument. In my opinion, "a collection of thoughtful primitives for others to extend" is more valuable now, not less. From LLM assisted engineering standpoint a nicely put reusable box with thoughtful interface is an easy win, more so if it is also easily extensible.
- taffydavid 5mo agoThis post calls out how you can't argue with these people because they say its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" the top reply is from someone doing exactly that, arguing "but the agents are so fast!"
- bayindirh 5mo agoI was talking with a friend in the early days of AI boom. I argued that over-reliance in AI will create all kinds of catastrophes. The answer I got is "It's game theory. Someone will do it, and you'll be forced to do it, too. It can't be that bad". I mean, yes, logic is useful, but ignorance of risks? Assuming that moving blazingly fast and pulverizing things will result in good eventually? This AI thing is not progressing well. I don't like this.
- chrisweekly 5mo agoreliance, not resilience
- bayindirh 5mo agoYep, you're right. I'm a bit tired and my fingers had a mind of their own. Thanks. :)
- Terr_ 5mo ago> The answer I got is "It's game theory. Someone will do it, and you'll be forced to do it, too. It can't be that bad". Oof. Potential "bad" outcomes of "game theory" should be calibrated to include all the bloody wars and genocides throughout recorded history. Why did the Foi-ites kill every man, woman and child of the conquered Bar-ite city? Because if they didn't, then they'd be at a disadvantage if the Bar-ites didn't reciprocate in the cities they conquered...
- bayindirh 5mo agoYeah, I know. I had counter arguments more targeted towards his thinking style, but he preferred to think straight like a machine, in a bad way. The problem was not him, but the fact that the number of people who thinks like him. They may word it in a more benign form, but the idea is the same. So obsessed with being the first mover and winning the battle, never thinking whether they should, or what would happen with that scenario. Missing the whole forest and beyond for a single branch of a single tree.
- slopinthebag 5mo agoI have a ton of respect for Mitchell - I didn't really know who he was until Ghostty but his writings and viewpoints on AI seem really grounded and make the most sense to me. Including this one. Many people on this forum are suffering under this same psychosis.
- glitchcrab 5mo agoI'm guessing you've never heard of Hashicorp (Terraform, Vault) then? Mitchell == Hashicorp.
- Groxx 5mo agoBug reports also go down when people lose faith that they will be fixed, because reporting them is often a substantial time commitment. You see it happen pretty regularly as trust in a group/company collapses.
- infinite_spin 5mo agoI agree, and I'd like to point out that this problem isn't unique to AI driven projects. I think much, if not all, of what Mitchell has been observing can readily happen without AI in the mix.
- Ekaros 5mo agoAdd this the real possibility that significant part of reports that get filed might be AI generated or rewritten. With high possibility of being misreported because of that. Or have incorrect parts... So attack on multiple sides. And we do not get even get into potential adversarial tactics. If you have no morals what is better than using agents to flood your competitor with fake bug reports.
- autoexec 5mo agoJust let AI filter out the fake reports! Then let AI work on the real ones. See, there's really no problem "more AI" can't solve (as long as you're willing to ignore all of the underlying ones). "Pay us to create the problems you'll have to pay us to fix for you" is one hell of a business model. It basically prints money.
- autoexec 5mo agoJust let AI report the bugs. Problem solved!
- jampa 5mo agoThe last three times I filed detailed bug reports as a client, all I got back were AI replies asking the same questions I’d already answered in the original report and suggesting alternatives I’d explicitly said I’d already tried. No wonder people don’t write bug reports anymore.
- selectively 5mo agoI do not believe 'AI psychosis' is an actual thing.
- lbrito 5mo agoIt is https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.pn.2025.10.10.5 https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.pn.2025.10.10....
- selectively 5mo agoThat's a study. I can link you studies that say violent video games cause aggression, that porn causes rape, etc. Studies are products of the biases of the researchers.
- cindyllm 5mo ago[dead]
- HarHarVeryFunny 5mo agohttps://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/applied-pope-losing-grip-reality-020218030.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/applied-pope-losing-grip...
- sometimelurker 5mo agoDo you believe that an AI can write persuasive text? Do you believe that an AI can be trained to elicit a specific user reaction?* Can we agree that AI companies are strongly incentivized to make money, and they can do so by making their systems addictive? Because AI psychosis can be a byproduct of that. *Il outline how briefly: mutate the model 500 times, give 1/500 of your user base a mutated version of the model, and save the top 5 of these model, ranked by how often the users did something, over the course of a week. Repeat for a year, passing the top 1% of these models onto the next round. This is the simplest way to do this and I can think of better ways to do this. I don't even work on this sorta thing; its 100% obvious to the AI labs how to do this better
- jgbuddy 5mo ago[flagged]
- bolangi 5mo agoWhen war psychosis is not enough....
- ivanjermakov 5mo agoDeprecating immature workflows (LLM agents in this case) is much simpler and faster than building them from scratch. Many companies get this risk assessment right. The case where being wrong is much more costly than being right.
- kelnos 5mo agoI'm not convinced. There's a ton of cost to adopting a radically different workflow.
- dtnewman 5mo agoIf you feel this way, you might like my new CLI tool, Burn, Baby, Burn (those tokens) (https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn/tree/main https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn/tree/main). Show HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48151287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48151287
- dnnddidiej 5mo agoCynic!
- stalfosknight 5mo agoThis is delicious.
- mattgreenrocks 5mo agoThe only way many people learn that the stove is hot is by burning their hands on it. Let them.
- dnnddidiej 5mo agoMore like how do you know when your charming partner is a catfish. Maybe 2 years and when you are living in a friends basement.
- impulser_ 5mo agoI'm pretty sure he's talking about companies and people outsourcing their decision making and thinking to AI and not really about using AI itself. I don't think using AI to write code is AI psychosis or bad at all, but if you just prompt the AI and believe what it tell you then you have AI psychosis. You see this a lot with financial people and VC on twitter. They literally post screenshots of ChatGPT as their thinking and reasoning about the topic instead of just doing a little bit of thinking themselves. These things are dog shit when it comes to ideas, thinking, or providing advice because they are pattern matchers they are just going to give you the pattern they see. Most people see this if you just try to talk to it about an idea. They often just spit out the most generic dog shit. This however it pretty useful for certain tasks were pattern matching is actually beneficial like writing code, but again you just can't let it do the thinking and decision making.
- sghiassy 5mo agoI think the author means that we as homosapiens cant stop talking about this new shinny hammer we just invited
- slopinthebag 5mo ago> companies and people outsourcing their decision making and thinking to AI It's so interesting how easy it is to steer the LLM's based on context to arriving at whatever conclusion you engineer out of it. They really are like improv actors, and the first rule of improv is "yes, and". So part of the psychosis is when these people unknowingly steer their LLM into their own conclusions and biases, and then they get magnified and solidified. It's gonna end in disaster.
- Sharlin 5mo agoIt’s almost as if we haven’t learned anything from Hans the horse, Ouija boards, "facilitated communication", or the countless examples of the folly of surrounding yourself with yes men. The point about improv is spot on.
- deleted 5mo ago
- throwawaypath 5mo agoMitchellh is on to something. Some of the AI products I've seen seem like psychosis hallucinatory fever dreams, using terms and concepts that have no meaning. Funding? $50,000,000 pre-seed.
- rightbyte 5mo agoWhen I note some strange money flow I just assume embazzlement or money laundering.
- bsenftner 5mo agoThis is a critical communications issue that is becoming what I believe the defining characteristic of "This Age": nobody knows how to discuss disagreement, and because it cannot even be discussed communication ends, followed by blind obedience, forced bullying, retreat and abandonment. This is going to be a hell of a ride, because nobody can really discuss the situation with a rational tone.
- sometimelurker 5mo agowhile I find myself agreeing with the posted tweet, I don't disagree that we need to communicate about things we disagree about better. Take my upvote
- spicyusername 5mo agoWe're definitely in the mess around phase of AI adoption. I don't think it's super clear what we'll find out. We've all built the moat of our careers out of our expertise. It is also very possible that expertise will be rendered significantly less valuable as the models improve. Nobody ever cared what the code looked like. They only ever cared if it solved their problem and it was bug free. Maybe everything falls apart, or maybe AI agents ship code that's good enough. Given the state of the industry were clearly going to find out one way or the other, hah!
- HarHarVeryFunny 5mo ago> I don't think it's super clear what we'll find out I think some companies will find out that their senior engineers were providing more value and software stability than they gave them credit for! Corporate feedback loops are very slow though, partly because management don't like to admit mistakes, and partly because of false success reporting up the chain. I'd not be surprised if it takes 5 years or more before there is any recognition of harm being done by AI, and quiet reversion to practices that worked better.
- gopalv 5mo agoThe AI psychosis is not the anti-opinion to the use of AI. I use AI coding tools every day, but AI tools have no concept of the future. The selfish thinking that an engineer has when they think "If this breaks in prod, I won't be able to fix it. And they'll page me at 3AM" we've relied on to build stable systems. The general laziness of looking for a perfect library on CPAN so that I don't have to do this work (often taking longer to not find a library than writing it by hand). Have written thousands of lines of code with AI tool which ended up in prod and mostly it feels natural, because since 2017 I've been telling people to write code instead of typing it all on my own & setting up pitfalls to catch bad code in testing. But one thing it doesn't do is "write less code"[1]. [1] - https://xcancel.com/t3rmin4t0r/status/2019277780517781522/ https://xcancel.com/t3rmin4t0r/status/2019277780517781522/
- projectazorian 5mo ago> I use AI coding tools every day, but AI tools have no concept of the future. The selfish thinking that an engineer has when they think "If this breaks in prod, I won't be able to fix it. And they'll page me at 3AM" we've relied on to build stable systems. Maybe it's just my prompt or something but my coding agent (Opus 4.7 based) says things like "this is the kind of thing that will blow up at 2am six months from now" all the time.
- empath75 5mo agoIt's really inconsistent though.. it takes shortcuts and leaves todos all the time without really calling it out explicitly, you have to pay close attention.
- hooo 5mo agoWhy do you all still submit twitter.com links when that domain does not even work?
- panavm 5mo ago[flagged]
- linkregister 5mo agoI don't doubt there are companies totally misusing coding agents and LLMs in production. There are also real companies with real revenue and solid architecture using LLMs to deliver products. There are also companies with real revenue and rapidly accumulating tech debt. Eventually the companies that can't cope with undisciplined engineering will succumb to unacceptable reliability and be outcompeted, just like in the "move fast and break things" era.
- vadepaysa 5mo ago"Just use autoresearch and it will fix your app's memory leaks in an hour" is what I was nonchalantly told by someone who has never written a line of code ever. I guess what I relate to the most is how dismissive people get about real software engineering work. I may have skill issues, but I am yet to reach the level of autonomous engineering people tend to expect out of AI these days.
- klashn 5mo ago[flagged]
- zamadatix 5mo agoThe lists of who's, what's, why's, and when's always change but when the decades pass it's never one narrow type of people or the "not me's" which are gullible - it's just human nature + regional timing. The targeted groups are the only ones who are really easy to break out.
- Terr_ 5mo agoI think you're mixing up "psychosis" with fads, trends, or perhaps executive excuses to do layoffs. A feature of psychosis is being unable to distinguish between external ideas and internal ones. For example, if a brown-nosing Yes-Man machine keeps reflecting your own leading questions back at you, laundering them into "independent" wisdom. In contrast, I'm pretty sure COVID and the invasion of Ukraine are actual external phenomena that affect businesses and economies.
- we1r8 5mo ago[flagged]
- perching_aix 5mo agoI'm going through a mixed experience regarding this, personally. Management is really pushing AI. It's obnoxious, and their idea on how it fits into my team's job specifically is completely, hilariously detached from reality. On the off chance someone says something reasonable, unless it fits the mold, it's immediately discarded. The mold being "spec driven development". We're not even a product team for crying out loud. I straight up started skipping these meetings for the sake of my sanity. It's mindwash, and it's genuinely dizzying. The other reason I stopped attending is because it ironically makes me more disinterested in AI, which I consider to be against my personal interests on the long run overall. On the flipside, I love using Claude (in moderation). It keeps pulling off several very nice things, some of which Mitchell touched on in this post (the last one): - I write scripts and automation from time to time; Claude fleshes them out way better with way more safety features, feature flags, and logging than I'd otherwise have capacity to spend time on - Claude catches missed refactors and preexisting defects, and does a generally solid pass checking for defects as a whole - Claude routinely helps with doing things I'd basically never be able to justify spending time on. Yesterday, I one-shotted an entire utility application with a GUI to boot, and it worked first try; I was beyond impressed. - Claude helped me and a colleague do some partisan cross-team investigation in secret. We're migrating <thing> and we were evaluating <differences>. There was a lot of them. Management was in a limbo, unsure what to do, flip-flopping between bad options. In a desperate moment, I figured, hey, we kinda have a thing now for investigating an inhuman amount of stuff in detail - so I've put together a care package for my colleague with all our code, a bunch of context, a capture of all the input data for the past one week, and all the logs generated. Colleague put his team's side of the story next to it, and with the help of Claude, did some extremely nice cross-functional investigation. Over the course of a few weeks, he was able to confirm like a dozen showstopper bugs, many of which would have been absolutely fiendish if not impossible to fix (or even catch) if we went live without knowing about them. One even culminated in a whole-ass solution re-architecturing. We essentially tore down a silo wall with Claude's help in doing this. So ultimately, it really is a mixed bag, with some really deep lowpoints and some really nice higlights. I also just generally find it weird that a technical tool [category] is being pushed down people's throats with a technical reasoning, but by management. One would think this goes bottom up, or is at least a lot more exploratory. The frenzy is real.
- zombiwoof 5mo ago[dead]
- nunez 5mo agoWelcome to the club, Mitchell! Pizza's to the right. In all seriousness...well, yeah. AI is a monkey's paw, and that's how monkey paws work. So many movies and books warned us!
- DonHopkins 5mo agoYou just have to wish for the rest of the monkey.
- crnkofe 5mo agoSounds pretty accurate. Bunch of comments on this thread sound like AI is some kind of a new doomsday cult. The most annoying thing I find personally is that all engineering principles are getting crushed by non techies. Management counting token usage, forcing agent use, reducing headcount in the name of productivity gain. Devs building bridges but nobody knows what the bridge is, what are the standards to which it was built, how it works and how to maintain it. VCs counting extra money claiming chasing the holy profit is the future. The abundance of engineering apathy is disturbing.
- hedgehog 5mo ago[dead]
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- zmmmmm 5mo agoI think AI rescue consulting is going to be come a significant mode of high value consulting, similar to specialists who come in to try and deal with a security breach or do data recovery. Purely AI written systems will scale to a point of complexity that no human can ever understand and the defect close rate will taper down and the token burn per defect rate scale up and eventually AI changes will cause on average more defects than they close and the whole system will be unstable. It will become a special kind of process to clean room out such a mess and rebuild it fresh (probably still with AI) after distilling out core design principles to avoid catastrophic breakdown. Somewhere in the future, the new software engineering will be primarily about principles to avoid this in the first, place but it will take us 20 years to learn them, just like original software eng took a lot longer than expected to reach a stable set of design principles (and people still argue about them!).
- uuyy 5mo agoAI janitors
- Brian_K_White 5mo agoIt's kind of like producing code is becoming more like farming. We didn't create the dna we rely on to produce food and lumber, we just set up the conditions and hope the process produces something we want instead of deleting all the bannannas. Farming is a fine an honorable and valuable function for society, but I have no interest in being a farmer. I build things, I don't plant seeds and pray to the gods and hope they grow into something I want.
- nradov 5mo agoPrayers are for weather. Pretty much all farmed plant, animal, and fungus species have been selectively bred or genetically modified. Farmers know what's going to grow.
- Brian_K_White 5mo agoFarming has merely a lot of study and input into the process, very little actual control and no determinism at all. We know how to improve chances is all. The fact that we breed and "engineer" is like a drop in the bucket.
- singpolyma3 5mo agoThis is... Not what psychosis means? Being wrong is not psychosis
- LogicFailsMe 5mo agoI shut down AI Agent fanatics on the regular. But chop one head off there and two take its place. And I say that as someone working with Claude and Codex daily. While they are both incredibly good at clearly described and defined atomic tasks, application scope makes them lose their minds and the slop ensues.
- mrwaffle 5mo agoSaying the _quiet_ part out loud.
- LAC-Tech 5mo agoI am really looking for more reasoned approaches to AI. I am very close to using it as a pair programmer, but with me actually coding. I am just so tired of fixing its mistakes.
- nunez 5mo agoIsn't going to happen without the regulation hammer being thrown down. Probably from the EU because they seem to be the sane ones of this generation.
- LAC-Tech 5mo agoTalking about my own personal workflow. No company has dictated one tl me yet lol.
- alexzhaosheng 5mo ago[flagged]
- mattbrewsbytes 5mo agoThe race to invent variants of Gas Towns, Ralph loops, pump out videos, blogs, etc. showing off greenfield development with cleverly named agents running in parallel is another case of engineering people diving head first into Resume Driven Development. Sure there are industry changing things going on. What if you're working on an app thats a decade old and has had different teams of people, styles, frameworks (thanks to the JS-framework-a-week Resume Driven Development)? Some markdown docs and a loop of agents isn't going to help when humans have trouble understanding what the app does.
- daneel_w 5mo agoI work for a small telecom services provider whose current VP immediately set an AI course when stepping on board 6 months ago. Involving AI in everything and every task is now our first priority - across all employee segments, not just us system developers - and leadership is embarking on a program to measure employees' AI usage levels as a means to gauge everyone's individual efficiency. It's like the era of the evangelic crypto bros all over again.
- gverrilla 5mo ago'AI psychosis' is a slop concept.
- flumpcakes 5mo agoThere's a lot of people writing bad code. With AI being forced top down (with the promise of turning people into 10x-ers), we're going to get a lot of people writing bad code 10x faster. I really do worry - I especially worry about security. You thought supply chain security management was an impossible task with NPM? Let me introduce to AI - you can look forward to the days of AI poisoning where AIs will infiltrate, exfiltrate, or just destroy and there's no way of stopping it because you cannot examine the internals of the system. AI has turbo charged people's lax attitude to security. God help us.
- mintplant 5mo agoNot security, but I ran into a related supply-chain issue recently. I needed a library to perform a moderately complex task, and found one in the ecosystem I was working with that had been around for a while, appeared reputable, and passed my cursory inspection. So I dropped it in, got the feature implemented, and moved on. Some time down the line, I discover CPU being maxed out, which is showing up in degraded performance in other parts of the system. I investigate, and I trace the issue to a boneheaded busy loop in this library that no human with the domain expertise to implement the library would have written. Turns out I'd missed one deeply-buried mention in the README that maintenance was being done via AI now, and basically the whole library had been rewritten from the ground up from the reliable tool it used to be to a vibecoded imitation. Yeah, yeah, sure, bad libraries existed before all this. But there used to be signals you picked up on to filter the gold from the dreck. Those signals don't work anymore.
- The_President 5mo agoPreach. No amount if AI will give an administrator an engineer's mind.
- topherPedersen 5mo agoHype & greed are a hell of a drug
- apalmer 5mo agoI don't think it's helpful to call this psychosis. N Beyond that I don't think it's even irrational. It is definitely factual that there is a complete paradigm shift in the prioritization of quality in software. It's beyond just AI side effects, and now its own stand alone thing. There have always been many industries, companies, and products who are low on quality scale but so cheap that it makes good business sense, both for the producer and the consumer. Definitely many companies are explicitly chosing this business strategy. Definitely also many companies that don't actually realize they are implicitly doing this. Wether the market will accept the new software quality paradigm or not remains an open question.
- matt3210 5mo agoLess users can be the cause of less bug reports
- Apocryphon 5mo agoMake the most of it. Their delusion is your opportunity.
- tamimio 5mo agoThe hype or psychosis is mainly by mediocre/non expert/middle manager/you name it, especially when a person who never wrote a single line of code suddenly is making a wall of text, and it actually works!? Oh my!! But in reality, anyone who knows their field and are going after certain specific issue, they will find soon how AI is nothing but an assistant, sure it can help and automate some stuff, but that’s it, you need to keep it leashed and laser focused on that specific issue. I personally tried all high end ones, and I found a common theme, they are designed to find a solution or an answer no matter what, even if that solution is a workaround built on top of workarounds, it’s like welding all sort of connections between A and B resulting in a fractal structure rather than just finding a straight path, if you keep it going and flowing on its own, the results are convoluted and way over complicated, and not the good complexity, the bad kind.
- the13 5mo agoThe entire problem is vibe coding is only good for demos, prototyping and finding signs of product market fit without actually releasing a product into the market. You should not release a product into the market unless you have a good enough product that can keep you and your client compliant, safe and secure - including not leaking their customer info all over the place. Prompt injection risk, etc. are massive for agentic AI without deterministic guardrails that actually work in practice. Stop testing in production if you're shipping in a regulated industry. Ridic! If you're not technical, you can get someone who is after signs of p-m fit, demos, but BEFORE deployment. This is common sense and best practices but startup bros dgaf because they're just good at sales and marketing & short term greedy. Comical.
- Ifkaluva 5mo agoThe Twitter post doesn’t even document some of the most psychotic things that are happening.
- madrox 5mo agoI saw this first hand at a company, and I think this is what happens when you combine FOMO with an utter lack of industry best practices. No one knows where they are going, but are convinced they are not getting there fast enough. What's more, the only people they talk to about it are others at the same company. There is no external touchstone. There are power dynamics from hierarchy. No new ideas other than what is generated within the company. In other circumstances, this is a textbook environment for radicalization. I would encourage all leadership to take a deep breath. You have time to think slow.
- dudul 5mo agoTotally unrelated pet peeve of mine, I hate when people write this: "MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery)". You first use the full words and then introduce the acronym that you're going to use in the rest of the text: "Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) vs. Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR)". With the latter, readers understand the term immediately, even if they don’t know the acronym. And they don't have to read these weird letters before getting the explanation.
- mmaunder 5mo agoAmazing how the dev community is suffering from a similar inability to approach the subject of real world AI efficiencies and business benefits. I don’t think it’s helpful to accuse the other side of psychosis. It disqualifies any data or experience they bring to the conversation.
- whimsicalism 5mo agoIt is not the dev community writ large, it is a particular archetype among forum users, particularly common among forums with upvote mechanics
- keepamovin 5mo agoIt seems the diagnosis of psychosis is too quick: it seeks to reestablish the frame of expert for the developer identity that is being replaced by it. “It feels like entire companies are deluded into thinking they don’t need me, but they still need me. Help!” The broad sentiment across statements of this “AI psychosis” type is clear, but I think the baseline reality is simpler. How can you be so certain it’s psychosis if you don’t know what will unfold? Might reaching for the premature certainty of making others wrong, satisfying that it might be to the ego, be simply a way to compensate the challenges of a changing work environment, and a substitute for actually considering the practical ways you could adapt to that? Might it not be more helpful and profitable to consider “how can I build windmills, ride this wave, and adapt to the changing market under this revolution” than soothing myself with the delusion that all these companies think they don’t need me now, but they’ll be sorry. The developer role is changing, but it doesn’t have to be an existential crisis. Even though it may feel that way — but probably it’s gonna feel more that way the more you remain stuck in old patterns and over-certainty about how things are doesn’t help, (tho it may feel good). This is the time to be observant and curious and get ready to update your perspective. You may hide from this broad take (that AI psychosis statements are cope) by retreating into specific nuance: “I didn’t mean it that way, you’re wrong. This is still valid.” But the vocabulary betrays motive. Resorting to clinical derogatory language like “AI psychosis” invokes a “superior expert judgment” frame immediately, and in zeitgeist context this is a big tell. It signifies a need to be right, anda deeply defensive pose rather than a clear assay of what’s real in a rapidly changing world. The anxiety driving the language speaks far louder than any technical pedantry used to justify it, and is the most important and IMO profitable thing to address.
- hoppp 5mo agoPointing out the obvious. A lot of companies have been under AI psychosis for years and will be forever.
- JeremyJaydan 5mo agoIf you don't use it you lose it, and a lot of people are losing it..
- awesomeusername 5mo agoIf you know these things you can take them into account while driving the AI. Sorry, I don't buy your argument
- charlotte-fyi 5mo agoI feel in a really weird position where I both really dislike what AI is doing to the experience and practice of writing code, to the point where I want a job doing literally anything else besides using the computer, but also think that these tools are extremely powerful and only getting better. I think Mitchell's point is well taken -- it's possible for these tools to introduce rotten foundations that will only be found out later when the whole structure collapsed. I don't want to be in the position of being on the hook when that happens and not having the deep understanding of the code base that I used to. But humans have introduced subtle yet catastrophic bugs into code forever too... A lot of this feels like an open empirical question. Will we see many systems collapse in horrifying ways that they uniquely didn't before? Maybe some, but will we also not learn that we need to shift more to specification and validation? Idk, it just seems to me like this style of building systems is inevitable even as there may be some bumps along the way. I feel like many in the anti camp have their own kind of reactionary psychosis. I want nothing to do with AI but I also can't deny my experience of using these tools. I wish there were more venues for this kind of realist but negative discussion of AI. Mitchell is a great dev for this reason.
- doginasuit 5mo agoI've never had more fun coding, but the key is actually still writing the code yourself. The LLM has terrible judgment but an encyclopedic knowledge and the ability to pick out important details in a sea of information. Their worse use is producing code, but somehow that gets all the energy. Being an LLM babysitter is energy draining and you feel less and less in control. No job is worth being miserable doing something that you used to enjoy.
- denkmoon 5mo agoWhat do you use an LLM for then? Or you’re saying just don’t use it at all?
- doginasuit 5mo agoI've used both ChatGPT and Claude, they seem interchangeable for my needs. I only use the web prompt interface except for the rare occasion that it is helpful for it to have the context of my entire project. I think less is more when it comes to LLM interaction, but sometimes they are exactly the right tool for the job.
- foxfired 5mo agoMaybe this is what will turn software engineering into an Engineering field. Right know, prompters are setting up whole company infrastructure. I personally know one. He migrated the companies database to a newer Postgres version. He was successful in the end, but I was gnawing my teeth when he described every step of the process. It sounded like "And then, I poured gasoline on the servers while smoking a cigarette. But don't worry, I found a fire extinguisher in the basement. The gauge says it's empty, but I can still hear some liquid when I shake it..." If he leaves the company, they will need an even more confident prompter to maintain their DB infrastructure.
- consumer451 5mo ago> Maybe this is what will turn software engineering into an Engineering field. Oh man, I think you may have touched the third rail here. My first job out of high school was as an AutoCAD/network admin at a large Civil & Structural firm. I later got further into tech, but after my initial experience with real Engineering, "software engineering" always made my eyes roll. Without real enforced standards, without consequences, it's been vibe engineering the whole time. In Civil, Structural, and many other fields, Engineers have a path to Professional Engineer. That PE stamp means that you suffer actual legal consequences if you are found guilty of gross negligence in your field. This is why Engineering firms are a collective of actual Professional Engineer partners, and not your average corporate structure. The issue is that in software dev, we move fast, SOC2 is screenshot theater, and actual Engineering would slow things way down. But, now that coding is fast, maybe you are correct! Maybe vibe coding is the forcing function for actual Software Engineering! ___ edit: I just searched to see if my comment was correct, and it turns out that Software PE was attempted! It was discontinued due to low participation. > NCEES will discontinue the Principles and Practice of Engineering (PE) Software Engineering exam after the April 2019 exam administration. Since the original offering in 2013, the exam has been administered five times, with a total population of 81 candidates. https://ncees.org/ncees-discontinuing-pe-software-engineering-exam/ https://ncees.org/ncees-discontinuing-pe-software-engineerin...
- SequoiaHope 5mo agoNote that other types of engineering are also often vibes based. The mechanical engineering for a rocket engine is extremely rigorous but the engineering for an injection molded housing for a cheap cell phone is a lot more about following a few heuristics and getting it out the door. Even in robotics where I work, it’s mostly about making parts that pass whatever acceptance tests you come up with. In civil engineering and aerospace failure costs human lives and millions or billions of dollars. In robotics maybe you have some machines fail in the field but in many instances you have one overarching safety system and many of the parts are irrelevant to that. The camera housing for example. So no paper trail or mathematical design validation is required to prove you designed it right. Often those are desirable but if you just manufacture it and test it a lot you’re probably fine. This was something I noticed in my early career in mechanical engineering and later doing PCB design and software for robotics. It’s easy to find firms that just need adequate parts without the professional certifications or ass-covering calculations of other engineering fields. All this to say, it’s not just software versus the rest of them. From my position, civil and aerospace seemed more like the exception while much of the rest of the engineering world is more vibes based.
- jimbokun 5mo agoThis reminds me of Rich Hickey’s “Simple Made Easy” and his approach in making Clojure. Even before LLMs generating entire programs, complex frameworks allowed developers to write the initial versions of programs very quickly, but at the cost of being hard to understand and thus hard to debug or modify. Some of us are betting that the AIs will always be smart enough to debug, maintain and modify the programs written by AI, no matter how convoluted or complex. I’m not so sure.
- sph 5mo agoAh, a cognitive Moore’s law, so to speak.
- Glyptodon 5mo agoThat people don't realize full test coverage just means every line is hit, not that everything is correct is always funny to me. (I don't view as an argument against tests, but with AI it's especially important as if you're aren't careful it'll be very happy to make coverage that is not quite right.)
- coffeefirst 5mo agoCorrect. Tests don’t tell you the code works. They tell you that something changed that impacts the test since the last time it did work.
- insane_dreamer 5mo agoJust talked to an exec yesterday about their multinational company, where the newly-installed CEO just came in with "everyone needs to be using AI" and "we should be doing everything with AI". I cautioned them that this a terrible idea -- you have business people who don't know what they're talking about, and all they know if "if we don't 'do AI' we'll be left behind because our competitors are 'doing AI'" (whatever tf "doing AI" means). Yes, LLMs are a great tool. But they're not like some magic bullet you stick into everything. Use it where it makes sense, and treat it like you would other tools. You make "doing AI" some kind of KPI in your org, and you're going to have people "doing AI" amazingly (LOC counts! tokens burned! tickets cleared!) while not actually being more productive, and potentially building something that is going to come down on your head for the next team to "clean up the AI mess".
- nwah1 5mo agoIs he talking about github?
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- sometimelurker 5mo agoI'd like to chime in and mention that its really obvious how to RL a coding agent to get the human addicted asap. and its also clear that there's a ton of $$$ to be made by doing this. therefore its done. the only LLMs I use are the ones I run locally because i know they aren't RL'ed for that metric (no incentive for the company that made them to make their open weights models addictive)
- puttycat 5mo agoInteresting angle, didn't think of this. How do you think/find that current tools are optimized for being addictive?
- sometimelurker 5mo agoI think there's a few things, but its a little subjective and its more about the style the ai uses when doing these than the actual specific behavior: - Nuggesting improvements to the code after finishing the task you gave it, very irritating when the improvements were obvious and the ai didn't implement them on its own - Not trying very hard when implementing something, leading to bugs, which leads to more tokens used (this behavior can be incentivized and learned with RL) Since its a known fact if a user continues a session after the LLM says something, its not hard to train against this. The least efficient way to do this would be to GPRO directly against the user base and try to get as many people talking to the AI, and with OAI having a billion monthly active users the least efficient method would work really well for them.
- thr0w 5mo agoHard to have sober talk about this since a lot of discourse is AI psychosis vs. AI naysayers. Does software quality seem to have taken a jump in the past few years to anyone? Not to me, seems to be getting worse. Think that's a decent signal. Can tell you I'm dealing with a non-technical VP who loves blast submitting vibe-coded PRs and while there's some quick wins, overall quality is bad, and we had our first real production outage that Claude one-shot caused but could not one-shot solve.
- ByThyGrace 5mo agoThere's an acceleration of current known processes that is being referred to as agent speed (vs human speed). But this is purely a mechanical effect. There don't seem to be augmentive cognitive effects. "AI has invented this revolutionary algorithm/workflow/architecture" is an article title you'd expect to see pop up quick, and often.
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- sheepscreek 5mo agoI have respect for Mitchel and I’ve spent a good deal of time trying to think of ways to justify his message. I can’t. Either I am missing a big piece or he is worrying about something that comes naturally as more software gets developed (and sooner). In any case, this is what blue-green deployments and gradual rollouts are for. With basic software engineering processes, you can make your end user experience pretty much bullet proof. Just pay EXTRA attention when touching DNS, network config (for core systems) and database migrations. Distributed systems are a bit more tricky but k8s and the likes have pretty solid release mechanisms built-in. You are still doomed if your CDN provider goes down. You just have to draw a line somewhere and face the reality head on (for X cost per year this is the level of redundancy we get, but it won’t save us from Y). The one thing I hadn’t mentioned - one I AM worried about - is security! I’ve been worried about it from before Mythos (basic prompt injection) and with more powerful models now team offence is stronger than ever.
- jnwatson 5mo agoYeah. The same processes that allow corporations to outsource their software to barely qualified 3rd-world body shops are the processes that allow you to deploy AI-generated code of unknown quality.
- teeray 5mo ago> "no no, it has full test coverage" There’s this delusion that if we somehow write enough tests that we’ll expunge every defect from software. It’s like everyone forgets that the halting problem exists.
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- gregjor 5mo agoPsychosis means inability to distinguish the real from the not real -- delusion. I don't think the article describes that, at least not in a literal or clinical sense. The author lifted a term usually applied to people who fall in love with chatbots and applied it to the context of software developers not understanding AI coding tools, and the limitations of those tools. AI coding swept over the software industry faster than most previous trends. OOP and its predecessor "structured programming" took a lot longer. Agile and XP got traction fairly quickly but still took longer than AI -- and met with much of the same kind of resistance and dire predictions of slop and incompetence. AI tools have led to two parallel delusions: The one Mitchell Hashimoto describes, and the notion that we (programmers) knew how to produce solid, reliable, useful, maintainable code before AI slop came along. As always with tools that give newbs, juniors, managers some leverage (real or imagined) we -- programmers -- get upset and react to the threat with dire warnings. We talk about "technical debt" and "maintainability" and "scalability." In fact the large majority of non-trivial software projects fail to even meet requirements, much less deliver maintainable code with no tech debt. Most programmers don't know how to write good code for any measure of "good." Our entire industry looks more like a decades-long study of the Dunning-Kruger effect than a rigorous engineering discipline. If we knew how to write reliable code with no tech debt we could teach that to LLMs, but instead we reliably get back the same kind of mediocre code the LLMs trained on (ours), only the LLMs piece it together faster than we can. With 50 years in the business behind me, and several years of mocking and dismissing AI coding whenever someone brought it up, I got dragged into it by my employer. And then I saw that with guidance and a critical eye, reasonably good specs, guardrails, it performed just as well and sometimes more throroughly than me and almost all of the people I have worked with during my career. It writes better code and notices mistakes, regressions, edge cases better than I can (at least in any reasonable amount of time). AI coding tools only have to perform better -- for whatever that means to an organization -- than the median programmers. If we set the bar at "perfect" they of course fail, but so do we. We always have. Right now almost all of the buggy, insecure, ugly, confusing software I use came from teams of human programmers who didn't use AI. That will quickly change and I can blame the bugs and crashes and data losses and downtime on AI, we all can, but let's not pretend we're really losing ground with these tools or that we could all, as an industry, do better than the LLMs, because all experience shows that we can't.
- jpease 5mo agoAlso, potentially a good band name in there: “very resilient catastrophe machine”
- agnosticmantis 5mo ago> I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. What's the historical context for this MTBF vs. MTTR reckoning?
- bastawhiz 5mo agoIf you optimize for MTBF, you optimize for it to be a long time between failures. You optimize for the system not going down in the first place, but when it does do down it might be Pretty Bad. If you optimize for MTTR, you don't care how often you go down and instead optimize your recovery time to be as short as possible. The concepts are pre-computing.
- sebmellen 5mo agoNot the GP commenter, but I'm still struggling to understand how this relates to the AI world, or perhaps more importantly, what the historical context was. Did people end up switching to MTTR optimization over MTBF optimization? If so, is the implication that the recovery times got lower but software instability went up as a result?
- tonymet 5mo agoMTBF = optimizing quality (reliability, uptime, correctness) of AI product MTTR = optimize the ability to correct failures when they occur. He's describing leaders who believe quality no longer matters because any faults or deviations can be corrected so quickly that it doesn't make any sense to waste time on quality.
- eddythompson80 5mo agoYes that’s very correct. The way I think of it, MTTR is easier to measure and manage as a manager. MTTR is all about “operational excellence”. Basically, when shit hits the fan, how good are we at figuring out what caused it and how to fix it. That’s a muscle that you can train, the script goes: - What alerts are we missing that could have helped us catch that earlier? - What dashboards could we have had to help diagnose the issue quicker? - What Ops tools could we have had to help mitigate such issue quicker? - What extra logging/metrics/telemetry could we add to help us catch this quicker? - What “safe deployment practices” could we have employed to avoid/improve this? - what processes could we enforce to facilitate all of that? Rinse and repeat that few hundreds or thousands of times while mounting MTTR KPI and you will see that number improve. Most likely through your team “gaming it” MTBF is much, much, tricker to measure or “manage out”. It’s about “excellence in engineering” which is not measurable nor controllable. You want a random feature X. Your team tells you it’s really not how the system works, and they want few months making the change slowly while observing the system. But you don’t want just X, you want X, Y, Z, W, V, Q, A, B, C, D, all the way throw AAZZW12. So you tell the team to go fuck itself.
- kseniamorph 5mo agoIt's worrying because it feels like a loss of control. But there must be control. And this what responsibility is. You should worry only about people who don't understand responsibility, not AI-inspired ones
- wesselbindt 5mo agoI was under the impression that anyone that uses the MTTR abbreviation knows enough to understand that you need to balance it with change failure rate, deploy frequency, and lead time.
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- heohk 5mo agoI call them True Believers
- lordmoma 5mo agohis worry is similar with search engine, I believe 90% of population don't even know how to properly do a good search in Google, that's why the info asymmetry still exists and the gap is bigger. It's just now we have AI.
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- HNisCIS 5mo agoI'm in a company going through this. Everyone outsources their thinking to LLMs and the results are painfully mediocre. The smart ones will use it to get their bearings on the topic then go to primary sources, the not so bright just ctrl-c ctrl-v. Have you ever been in an HN thread where you're an SME on the thread topic and just been horrified by the confidently incorrect nonsense 90% of the thread is throwing around? Welcome to the training set motherfuckers. LLMs do the same thing for what should be obvious reasons. If you search things that have some depth and you know the answer you'll be flooded by how often the models will just vomit confident half truths and misrepresented facts. They're better than they used to be, not just lying whole cloth most of the time, but truth is an asymptotic thing, not an exponential one.
- tonymet 5mo agoGood point but he didn't go far enough. I would expand the AI psychosis to include all local optimization based on phony measurements , even time spent , DAU etc (which are mostly bots & synth accounts). In other words AI psychosis has been going on for 20+ years. The only reason it worked has been expansive money policy and a larger share of the cost of goods being dumped into marketing value while manufacturing costs dropped abroad. so no one bothered to check.
- imrozim 5mo agoI use ai to build a startup but I still decide what to build. Letting ai makes product decisions is where companies loose it.
- xorgun 5mo ago[dead]
- itqwertz 5mo agoThe real AI psychosis is the expectation of 5x/10x productivity gains akin to the mythical 10x developer during the 2010s JS growth period. At the end of the day, we can only read so much and take on so much work before we bottleneck ourselves. Cognitive overload leads to burnout. Rumplestiltskin vibes with this AI stuff…
- wg0 5mo ago> lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure. Can someone please remind and refresh my memory what this whole debate was with what arguments?
- ActorNightly 5mo agoBuilding things not to fail vs what Netflix does, build things to recover from failure.
- wg0 5mo agoReminds me of this horrifying documentary: https://www.netflix.com/us/title/81095095 https://www.netflix.com/us/title/81095095
- BrenBarn 5mo ago> "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" The groundwork for that was laid long ago with the idea of constant updates. It's been fine for years to ship bugs and rely on a rapid release cycle and constant pressure on users to upgrade everything all the time. To roll that back requires a lot more than toning down AI psychosis; it requires going back to a go-slow mindset where you actually don't release things until they're ready. It still needs to be done, but it's harder than just laying off the AI kool-aid.
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- cstrahan 5mo agoThat seems like an odd way to interpret what they wrote. Imagine old school machinists saying to a CNC machinist “Ha! See, maybe you don’t jog the axes manually, but you still have to be involved in placing the stock material, and you have to do the CAD/CAM work - so did it really machine the part for you? No!” AI is a tool like any other. It has its limitations. It has classes of problems that it is suited to handle, and others it isn’t. If it’s true that they haven’t written (as in “typed out by hand”) a single line of code, why can’t they say that without you making that statement into more than it is? I haven’t written a single line of code in 6 months, and that’s simply fact. It is also true that I put in a lot of other work to make that feasible, but that work isn’t in the form of writing code. “it’s mature and the next step of engineering” Tautologically, it’s mature enough for what it is mature enough for, and it certainly is the next step in the same way that CNC was the next step for machining — if you’re not using it as a machinist, you’re going to produce less compared to those who are. Same thing with garden hoses. Yes, you can go fetch water from a lake and splash it on your lawn, or, you know, you could just use a sprinkler connected to your garden hose. Doesn’t replace buckets. Buckets just have a narrower scope in a world where garden hoses exist.
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- germandiago 5mo agoHonest comment: it is transition time. This time is to make bets and take positions. Your humble position maybe. I already took a couple of decisions. It will go wrong or well. But is was decided a year and a bit ago. If you think the future will be different, stop doing the same you used to do the same way you used to do it. My analysis is that the labour market will increasingly bargain salaries and will make pressure on you. So how safe is that compared to before? Maybe working for someone as an employed full time person is not the best thing you can do anymore.
- shoopadoop 5mo agoThe massive, destabilizing layoffs feel like AI psychosis to me.
- david_blitz1 5mo agoWhat is described in the tweet may be worrying or not but it does not describe anything close to psychotic behavior.
- TonyStr 5mo ago> "In psychopathology, psychosis is the inability to distinguish what is or is not real. Examples of psychotic symptoms are delusions, hallucinations, and disorganized or incoherent thoughts or speech." I think the use of the word here is meant to invoke the vision of someone under heavy delusions or hallucinations, such as (what Hashimoto percieves as) the delusion that shipping more bugs is fine if AI can resolve them faster. To what extent this counts as delusion (and thereby psychosis) would depend on how deeply you believe that this and related opinions are wrong.
- pojzon 5mo agoIm not afraid to say AI model trained on petabytes of data is better than me in many things. Thankfully most of those things are a very small percent of my overall work. If its a big percent of your work -> you are in trouble friend.
- ben_w 5mo agoI was thinking about a different topic that could have the same headline just the other day. Never mind code, what happens when the CEOs, or the investors, listen to the sycophantic voices of their LLMs? I think it looks like every product becomes the next Juicero of its field.
- trizoza 5mo agoYou're speaking of my company and I'm forever grateful. I'm afraid to say this out loud internally because I'm afraid of the next round of layoffs and I want to keep my job. So I just keep on shipping at a high pace, building massive cognitive debt and hoping the agents will get so good in near future, that there won't be the need for understanding the codebase.
- pbasista 5mo ago> hoping the agents will get so good in near future, that there won't be the need for understanding the codebase Agents might get better. But who will own the code and take responsibility for it? The AI agent? The company who created the AI agent? If e.g. a car crashes and does not deploy its airbags because the AI agent made a mistake in the airbag code, will the manufacturer be able to shift the blame to OpenAI or Anthropic? I do not think so. And therefore I believe that no matter how good the AI agents will ever become, the ultimate responsibility for the code will always remain with the companies that create the code. Regardless of which AI tools they use. I see no other way to bear that responsibility by the company than to have people internally who will be responsible. And those people, if they actually want to own that responsibility, would need to understand that code themselves, in my opinion. Because relying on a non-deterministic AI agent's vetting is fundamentally unreliable, in my opinion.
- rwmj 5mo agoThe developers signing off on this will be "Human crumple zones" to protect the company from liability. Be very cautious if asked to sign off on anything like this.
- daemin 5mo agoThis is why nearly all people that write code are not engineers, no "Software Engineer" would be willing to sign off on their code like this, yet this is level of safety guarantees real engineering is about.
- thisisit 5mo agoRecently I had a request come through to allow finance analysts to vibe code their apps. During a discussion one of the finance managers let the cat out of the bag. Turns out our CFO had met fellow CFOs at a get together. They talked about how each of them were using AI. Our CFO was lagging behind and felt that we need to "accelerate" our usage of AI. He wants to push it just because he lost a bragging contest.
- ares623 5mo agoI call this Dinner Driven Development. That feeling of being Patrick Bateman when everyone is sharing their calling cards must be every C-suite's nightmare.
- 0xpgm 5mo agoThings like this make me realize the software engineering 'industry' is not a real industry. There are people who write important software that the world runs on, but they do it outside the 'industry'. A real industry should be responsive to events of nature, or at least the market, not vibes.
- _heimdall 5mo agoOh its well within industry norms for leaders to make decisions based on dick measuring contests.
- DonsDiscountGas 5mo agoI don't know why you think a "real" industry would work in the most idealized way. The media heavily reports on the stupid insane crap of the tech industry, that doesn't mean every other industry is sane they're just not as vocal on Twitter.
- wrxd 5mo agoI’m at a FAANG and we have $300/day token quota. Personally I don’t use that much of it but management is pushing really hard for it. “the quota has been raised for a reason, use it”. Any task: “have you tried working on it with Claude?”. Every meeting “now engineer x and y will show you what he did with AI”. It’s not all useless but most of the days I think I would be more productive if some processes were streamlined rather than if I had to throw tokens at them and still fail. Of all the showcases I’ve seen the best are the ones written by people assuming that the token bonanza will not last so they used AI to build tools they wished they had. AI used to build the tool but by no means used by the tool, so if/when token quota gets reduced we still have a functional tool.
- utopiah 5mo agoInnovation signalling.
- solenoid0937 5mo agoAlso at a FAANG here. Surprised you don't manage to use $300 in a whole day. It's almost trivial to productively use that much in under an hour. Leadership is not being dumb, at least on this topic. If your token usage is that low, you just aren't using AI that much (even if you think you are.)
- haneul 5mo agoHow are you able to get to $300/hr productively? (I’m assuming this isn’t fast mode tax).
- blazespin 5mo agonot hard, massive elo stuff. every decision point needs to think up and implement 25 ideas and then rank them.
- denkmoon 5mo agoI use $30 a day to produce a decent amount of code. Certainly more than we need - thinking about/designing the correct solution/distilling requirements is still the bottleneck. How can you possibly even review $300/day worth of output?
- thinkingemote 5mo agoUp to 80% of software projects fail. Most startups will fail. VC's and bankers know this. Does using AI increase or lower that failure rate? Does seeing a project that uses AI fail mean it wasn't going to fail if it didn't use AI? To try to answer it with my gut: I imagine that we could see more projects failing, but the percentage that fail would be the same. Most projects that use AI will fail because most projects generally will fail, but the time and cost to get a successful project will lower.
- bob1029 5mo agoThe longer I look at the AI transformation, the more it seems like a people problem than a technology problem. The technology is undeniably there. The people are all over the place. I am watching a 10 person company try to run 3 different AI initiatives in parallel. Everyone wants to be "the guy" on this one. I cannot imagine there will ever be a bigger opportunity to ego trip as a technology person. This is it. This is the last call before it's all over. There are many businesses out there that are beyond traumatized by human developers taking them on bad rides. The microsecond they think this stuff will work they are going to fire everyone. The psychosis comes from the tension here. We effectively have The Empire vs the rebel alliance now. I know how the movies go, but in real life I think I'd rather be working on the Death Star than anywhere else.
- luodaint 5mo ago[dead]
- epolanski 5mo agoMy biggest grief, among many, is that the field is just no longer enjoyable to work in. I cannot deny the impact of AI for my daily tasks at this point. But I just don't enjoy the field anymore. With increased productivity, also coming from my stellar coworkers, it feels like we're rat racing who outputs more. The quality is good, and having very strong rails at language and implementation level, strong hygiene, etc helps tremendously. But reality is that the pace of product vastly outpaces the pace at which I can absorb it's changes (I'm also in a very complex business logic field), and the same might be true about my understanding of the systems which are changing too fast for me to keep up. I feel mentally fatigued from a long time, I don't enjoy coding no more bar the occasional relaxing personal project where I can spend the time I want without pressures on architectural or implementation details. I'm increasingly thinking of changing field, this one is dying right under our eyes. I often read comments about HN users still delving at their place with technical details or rewriting AI code to their liking. I'm increasingly sure that these people live in happy bubbles where this luxury still exists. But this methodology of work is disappearing across the industry, team by team. Of course SE will not disappear over night, but the productivity expectations, the complexity ballooning are raising the bar where only incredibly skilled and productive engineers will be still able to practice SE properly, and as long as they meet stakeholders expectations or keep living in those bubbles.
- kilroy123 5mo agoI felt this way before LLMs hit the scene. I'm trying so hard to pivot away because of this.
- wehaRtz 5mo ago[flagged]
- zzvimercm 5mo ago[flagged]
- mayliu2000 5mo ago[flagged]
- choeger 5mo agoSo rewriting gets cheaper and cheaper. New features fall more or less into the same category. Refinement doesn't. The question is: Will we live in the world of breathless re-implementation, new features every week, rebranding every quarter or will we eventually discover the value of stability, software that does its thing more or less optimally for decades? Recent examples of things like curl or Firefox are interesting in that regard. Will we end up with a nearly perfect HTTP user agent and stick with it for decades?
- ngruhn 5mo agoPreferring "boring software" over the shiny new thing is common wisdom. Sounds like we prefer stability for stuff we use but not for stuff we sell.
- mashijian 5mo ago[flagged]
- trwhite 5mo agoThe DevOps team at my company wants to hire a replacement for a very talented engineer. They’ve been interviewing candidates. The board got wind of it and someone not in their team decided they needed an AI Engineer, which is absolutely not what they want. So to release the funds they have been forced to change the job description and go after a different type of role altogether. It’s complete nonsense.
- tossandthrow 5mo agoI don't entirely know what rational discussions that can not be had? It seems like he is pointing out that Ai will increase the complexity of a system oblivion, and that this is the discussion that can not be had. Bit I am more than happy to talk about how I am using Ai to reduce complexity and remove architectural debt that I otherwise could not justify spending time on.
- skywhopper 5mo agoSo it sounds like he’s not talking about you. He’s talking about people who actively choose to ignore complexity risk and refuse to have a rational discussion about it because they believe AI will always be able to fix it.
- zhenglei11 5mo ago[flagged]
- dkobia 5mo agoThe primary issue here is that CEOs and investors are particularly vulnerable to AI psychosis which is then forcibly propagated to the rest of the organization. Understandably, the perceived benefits are almost impossible to ignore, compounded by the FOMO of the AI first/AI native narrative being sold by AI influencers.
- solatic 5mo agoI don't think this is actually anything new. In large-enough companies, even before AI, it was and is quite common for executives to lose touch with base reality. I don't think anyone is under any delusion that people like Mark Zuckerberg intimately know the entirety of their corporate codebases. Everything is filtered through layers and layers of middle management whose summaries, cherry-picked statistics, and perpetually up-and-to-the-right graphs make it difficult to have an objectively informed opinion. Companies would, are, and will have mass layoffs that unintentionally (or, intentionally but with indifference to the consequences) fire key engineers whose loss results in "familiarity debt" within the systems those engineers owned. Calling this "psychosis" is maybe a neologism but it's apt in perspective. All that's actually new with "AI psychosis" is an acceleration of that phenomenon. The agents will summarize status faster than any middle manager. Claude will happily draw you any "up-and-to-the-right" graph you please, with the most common contemporary examples being "tokens burned" and "lines of code written". And vibe coding doesn't even require paying the cost of a mass layoff to get the "familiarity debt". There have always been both good and bad engineering leaders. No tool will magically make a bad leader into a good leader overnight. There is nothing new under the sun.
- lo_zamoyski 5mo agoPossibly psychosis. Possibly just serious ignorance and mob mentality. Leadership is supposed to be phlegmatic and measured; instead, we are saddled with hysterical hotheads. (Of course, when they are phlegmatic and chasing fads, then it does indeed resemble psychosis.) Worth also noting is that while there is plenty to criticize about AI use — especially any cultish behavior surrounding it — plenty of naïveté about the quality of its results, there is a also a strain of categorical opposition to it among some tech people that is equally off and that has all the hallmarks of the chickens coming home to roost. For years, many in tech gladly “automated away” all sorts of jobs. Large salaries were showered on them for doing so, or at least promising to do so (there was and is plenty of bullshit here, too). Now, AI appears to threaten to derail the tech gravy train, especially for SWE work that’s run-of-the-mill (which is most of it). Now automation is bad. It’s a delicious juxtaposition.
- elif 5mo agoAI psychosis is real, but at worst is only premature. AI-denial psychosis is far more pervasive, and will bite far more people in the long run.
- fjdjshsh 5mo agoI find talking about X psychosis (or generally using mental illness metaphors) unproductive. It sets up the conversation to be "nothing else to do with this person". Maybe the problem is you, but you won't figure that out if you think the other person has psychosis. For example, maybe you need to do a better job explaining, changing your language, simplifying things, being more concrete with consequences. Or maybe you aren't understanding that the other person has different objectives/ loss function that makes them make seemingly weird conclusions.
- sdeframond 5mo agoSometimes I feel like "doing it with AI" is the new "rewriting python in rust". Rewriting in rust does makes things faster but if an algorithm is O(n²), the improvement won't take us much farther. Similarly with AI, if complexity is not structurally adressed, the velocity gains are but temporary.
- youknowwhoiam11 5mo ago[flagged]
- robofanatic 5mo agoHe is a billionaire and still thinks at a developer level is pretty remarkable! Hope other billionaires pay attention to this!
- Simon_O_Rourke 5mo agoI'm just waiting for my current company to have a Sev 1 CritSit so I can document the bejesus out of the root cause and expose our non-technical AI evangelist leadership as the sort of goons most of the senior development staff already suspect. Only by walking us into some revenue or customer impacting failure - through inappropriately having junior devs doing senior level things - will some sense of sanity start to prevail again.
- popcorncowboy 5mo agoOh man, if only. The top brass driving this screaming frenzied MORE AI crusade will never face the firing line no matter what happens. It will either be a) "mistakes were made" and nobody is really at fault because we're all trying to change the world or fellate the future or whatever the line is, or b) James, Sam, Jesse, and the rest of Team B (none of whom are truly top brass) are getting fired out of a cannon into the sun as a warning to the rest of the plebs.
- iamacyborg 5mo agoCompany I just left is reportedly now using Claude to analyse the metadata generated from the company MDM that tracks actual laptop use, and then pulling people up if they're not working "enough". They're also reportedly now giving staff AI-related "homework" in an attempt to force staff to use AI more.
- p2detar 5mo agoInteresting. Were those Windows or MacOS laptops?
- iamacyborg 5mo agoBoth
- youknowwhoiam11 5mo ago[flagged]
- jqpabc123 5mo agoCorporate management in the USA is focused on the short term and reactionary. Changing this focus is not easy but one thing that will usually do the trick is economic issues. In other words; in order to get any serious consideration, something has to be broken. AI is perfectly capable of doing this given enough time.
- youknowwhoiam11 5mo ago[flagged]
- youknowwhoiam11 5mo ago[dead]
- deadbabe 5mo agoAt work they are purging any developers who are not all in on AI. I must constantly be in full support of AI to not get fired, despite whatever my true thoughts are, including anything I post on LinkedIn. There can be no doubt.
- rglover 5mo agoPeople just need to calm down. We're scaring the shit out of ourselves for no reason. Just like, chill man. It's a tool; not the second coming.
- hu3 5mo agoIt has potential to remodel society though. Cars replaced horses. But AI is poised to replace a large chunk of brain labour. Where's the ceiling?
- rglover 5mo ago> Where's the ceiling? A stable civilization that doesn't devalue human life and well-being to the point of absurdity.
- sometimelurker 5mo agothats the ideal ceiling, but I don't see why we won't surpass that. > People just need to calm down I think people need to make sure ceilings are built, and we can calm down once we're done.
- sometimelurker 5mo agoIts a tool that is built by people who are incentivized to have you addicted to it.
- rglover 5mo agoAnd how.
- sometimelurker 5mo agoOAI has a billion users. They can train the model directly against the metric of how often those users use the model. (mutate it many times, test which one works best, keep that, repeat). The model would (did) learn to be sycophantic and persuade the user to keep talking with it by constantly suggesting new things. The hype only makes this easier for them because it leads to people believing that the model is super-credible and trustworthy. They do this because it is easy and it makes them money.
- kalkin 5mo agoI think there's a reasonable argument that our entire society right now is under AI psychosis: The stock market keeps going up in the face of the indefinite closure of Hormuz. We're investing in datacenters at a scale that only makes sense if AI capabilities continue to advance to the point where they surpass most humans at most white collar tasks, if not reach superintelligence. And what are the possible outcomes? - Bust. We've come away with a useful tool but the hundreds of billions of capital expenditure were thrown away on a pipe dream. - Success! We're the dog that's caught the car. Then what? Currently the political debate is, to caricature only slightly, between "oh no the datacenters will use more water than golf courses" and "lol what are you going to do, regulate matrix multiplication?". How the hell are we going to cope with introducing a new intelligent species? Either way, it sure seems like we're collectively operating more in the interests of the future AI than in the interests of humanity. What is this, if not a sort of psychosis?
- jl6 5mo agoAnother possibility is that the hype continues, growing and growing and sucking up more and more resources, and the piper has to wait yet another day to be paid, until someone figures out how to pivot to the next big thing and all the debt (financial, social, environmental) gets carried forward and we keep going. In other words, BAU for the last few thousand years.
- reiter 5mo ago[flagged]
- kazinator 5mo ago[dead]
- hmokiguess 5mo agoThe tone of the twitter post feels very personal, and emotional, and I am sorry for the author. I hope he can find peace and calm with the pace of change to put forward his best self without needing to act like he needs to defend or fight something. The energy feels misdirected and maybe also a communication issue, I think spreading awareness needs to come not from attacking and also not from attempts to change people’s perception. It’s also quite challenging to distill a concept when it’s new, we learn both from our experiences and experiences of others; but, so far, these alleged systems that will eventually collapse, haven’t done so yet and it makes it sound like you’re preaching and predicting, condemning even, rather than raising awareness and education. Not trying to sound hopelessly optimistic either, just that the other extreme isn’t also helpful, and that a spectrum is not what we want it to be but what the collective shapes it, so saying psychosis is rejecting the harsh reality that they’re far removed from your worldview and not working towards an understanding. EDIT: Maybe I'm old and I don't get twitter, I also don't know much about the challenges he faced communicating his concerns, I sort of had a meta comment with the intent of "try listening more first, some people are difficult to reason with but respond better if you just let them speak and look for a teachable moment during the conversation". Anyways, I'm in agreement that there's too much unsupervised AI in the wild, I'm not saying he's wrong more like saying that doubling down on "stop doing that" will likely be ignored by those that are already ignorant to it, hence what I wrote above.
- vlovich123 5mo ago[dead]
- gofreddygo 5mo agoyes, the tone feels personal, and I feel happy for the author for expressing it on a platform that is desgned for it. He is clear in pointing out the hard earned lessons we have learned before and how the current actions are essentially undermining it. This is dumb (i agree) and he expects better from people whom he respects. it's clear, personal, logical. I don't understand what your criticism is.
- hmokiguess 5mo ago
- zombot 5mo agoCase in point: Amazon pressuring its workers to maximize AI use. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48148337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48148337
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- ghostlyy 5mo ago[flagged]
- ttz 5mo agoLike all things... this too shall pass.
- bsoles 5mo agoMy company is one. They just made "AI use" a mandatory performance goal for next year's reviews. I am thinking about retiring at this point...
- JackSlateur 5mo agoEasiest goal ever ! Just use https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn :p
- ryanSrich 5mo agoGenerally agree. I use AI very heavily, but rarely am I letting it actually think for me. It's a tool that reduces the time it takes for ideas in my head to manifest into reality. If you don't have those ideas, or a poor understanding of the system the AI is working on, you're going to produce slop. If you can't recognize this slop, you're more susceptible to having psychosis.
- naorsabag 5mo ago[flagged]
- apassintofuture 5mo agothis AI transitionary phase to Quantum, light chanels and new way computation will be architected will in the future be looked at similar to a toxoplasmosis like societal wide parasite, which invaded the host in order for the host to act more favorably to it
- NexiunDev 5mo ago[flagged]
- low_tech_love 5mo agoWe built too many layers of abstraction, so much that even the people in power have forgotten where the fantasies are. The objective reality is behind so many curtains that we forgot what is powering the whole theatre play to begin with. Or maybe we know but became too far detached from it to care. If you are at the same the better and the player, then what’s left?
- blazespin 5mo agoThe problem is that the only thing that has proved out so far is cyber security. Unfortunately cyber security improvements is not going to improve living standards, and it's just going to increase the cost of just doing business. There is no productivity boost, in fact it's the opposite. What we need is automated research that leads to real results. This is possible, but it has yet to prove out. I am concerned that unless the AI companies focus entirely on this, it may be a while before we actually see true benefits from this. What's worse, is there is an urgent and desperate need for automated research, as we have been seeing diminishing returns in human produced research for some time now: https://web.stanford.edu/~chadj/IdeaPF.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/~chadj/IdeaPF.pdf
- rogermarley 5mo agoI think one factor is AI is encouraging people to turn off their brains. It sometimes feels like AI chatbot use is like the doomscrolling of work - it's always easier just to dump something into the chatbot than think about it. The real question is: what's the fallout going to be after the dust settles? My guess is that the explosion of codebase entropy now underway from this is going to make for an interesting future - once it reaches the point where AI agents are spinning constantly despite progress grinding to a halt. And they're be no veterans who know the codebase deeply to step in and fix things because it was all vibecoded - and then what are companies going to do? I think that's the point where they turn back to the thinkers for help.
- __natty__ 5mo agoDeliberate thinking will be a think soon in our field.
- kshri24 5mo agoThis specific psychosis is driven by peer pressure. If you are seeing everyone around you using tools to "enhance" their work, you wouldn't want to be "left behind". So it has permeated the entire ecosystem. The lucky ones are those who are outside this (or can afford to be outside this) and can see why it isn't working. You can't be inside it and hope to have any rationality. Everyone is competing on "I can figure it out better and quicker than you can if only I can get X to work".
- thenthenthen 5mo agoVery general comment/sentiment/observation here for me personally is that about a year or two ago, everyone asked me ‘so ..where is the ai’. Nowadays it seems that this sentiment is already on its way out and I see more and more ‘no ai used’ statements and non-ai workshops popping up. I am in a weird place between art, technology and ecology so I get the best and worst of these worlds. But yeah, I feel the hype cycle is coming to an end in my personal bubble. I never cared or feared ai, I mainly fear the mania around it. Luckily I am in a position where I can afford to just observe. Sure I have used AI and it helped me a lot, mainly to get projects going when I am exhausted/stressed.
- Khaine 5mo agoI believe it. I've seen the cyber team in my org bend every rule just to get access to frontier security models. Everyone has become like petulant children. Senior leaders want access to every shiny tool (CoWork/Codex/etc) that has some buzz around it. No one seems to care about the cost or whether we are actually realising benefits. It's sheer madness, and you can't push back. I think AI can significantly help people be more productive, and I can see a future where they safely take on more autonomy. But we are far from that world.
- ileonichwiesz 5mo agoI’m at a large Fortune 500 company. On a recent call, a mandate came from the CEO himself - “we have to use more agentic AI”. And I found it really funny, because for what? Use it for what? It’s a tool. Imagine a guy coming down to a construction site where everything is progressing fine and saying “We need to use more screwdrivers”.
- chris_explicare 5mo ago[flagged]
- j45 5mo agoCompanies who use AI passively and mindlessly will create immense opportunity for those who don't is a concrete definition for risk to companies, similar to the risk to individuals who go down the validation hole with AI.
- violin220 5mo ago[dead]
- ionwake 5mo ago[dead]
- __natty__ 5mo agoThis whole situation of forcing people to spend tokens is hilarious and shows who is true tech manager and who is impostor in the field. I think it’s a good indicator of competence and hopefully board members see that soon.
- Lapsa 5mo ago"In 1975, Dr. Joseph Sharp proved that correct modulation of microwave energy can result in wireless and receiverless transmission of audible speech."
- user205738 5mo agoI was reminded of the universe of Doctor Who. It's an incredibly complex technology, but it often behaves either unpredictably, like AI agents, or like code written by a vibe-coder without understanding the architecture or boundary conditions. And programmers are more like architects of consciousness, building machines rather than writing code. Similarly, when the Doctor hacks a PC, he doesn't write code but rather communicates with the computer, using diplomacy to crack the agent. It is likely that we will come to a world where software solutions are "grown" by iterations of agent work, and no one will know exactly how it works. I think this will happen. A quick, low-quality solution is more common than a solution created by a master craftsman. In addition to low-quality furniture, bad knives, electric kettles that burn out after a week, and poorly cut clothes that don't fit, have unpleasant fabric, and fall apart, there will also be a disposable, rotting code. Master programmers will remain, just as master craftsmen have remained. They may even continue to earn well. However, there will be fewer of them, and the requirements for their skills, knowledge, and reputation will increase.
- deterministic 5mo agoI use AI heavily. But my #1 productivity tool is still a custom code generator I wrote 15+ years ago. It routinely generates about 90% of the code needed to write a biz application. So using AI to write productivity tools is a great way to go IMHO.
- casey2 5mo agoCloud people highly overvalue random web-services that most people (and most of the economy) simple don't rely on in any critical fashion. Yes, there are some example of people who make lots of money a day on these services, most people make pennies or nothing. Github is not critical infrastructure. It's your personal social media addiction.
- ge96 5mo agoJust heard this today "things that took 4 months to build we can do in 30 minutes" like alright Also this saying "you guys aren't going to lose your jobs, you'll just work more" it's funny