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I think the gloating in this thread is very misguided. Meta is evil, sure, but that's not the point. The point is that this kind of AI psychosis might be the ne

I think the gloating in this thread is very misguided. Meta is evil, sure, but that's not the point. The point is that this kind of AI psychosis might be the new normal for our industry, or at least one of the new normals. My last workplace absolutely did a jump in toxicity when the CEO got obsessed with AI, instituted token leaderboards, told us all to drop all non-AI work for a time, etc. We were no Meta.

crystal_revenge 4mo ago
> AI psychosis might be the new normal for our industry I've been fortunate enough to have worked on multiple AI intensive engineering teams (both on the product and research side) where considerable effort was spent reasoning through how AI was changing things and we were consistently evolving our practices. But they've all been orgs with 50 people less. AI psychosis seems to effect very large tech orgs in a different way than small, high impact teams. In small startups, at the end of the day, if the team doesn't ship a quality product, the company fails. Most importantly, every individual still bares the responsibility of their work. Personally, I've seen a lot of thoughtfulness around things like bad PRs because, on good teams, people realize we're all struggling to figure this out. But nonetheless, if something doesn't go well, there's always an individual that needs to figure out how to make it better. Virtually all the things I've learned about functionally shipping products built with and using AI have come from teams like this. Software engineering is changing, but for those of us shipping products, it reminds me a lot of the early webdev days when we were all trying to figure out the patterns to make this new world of software work reliably (anyone who recalls the pre-jQuery JavaScript days will remember how much we had to figure out before webdev could become what is today). In large tech orgs there's a much, much larger disconnect between employee effort and concrete value delivered and similarly much larger diffusion of responsibility. When accountability is abstract and nobody is quite sure what the real value of their work is, then there is fertile ground for AI psychosis to run amok. In part this is because there is a certain latent psychosis in these larger orgs anyway; who's "productive" and what's "valuable" always requires a bit of imaginative story telling, not necessarily grounded in reality. However, I don't think this will persist long as the "new normal". Just like in the rise of web application development, smaller teams will charge ahead and figure some of this stuff out. The MVC pattern applied to webapps, increasingly powerful JavaScript frameworks and best practices, agile practices, git and the popularization of github, the use of No SQL for scaling etc all primarily where battled tested by smaller, high velocity startups and now lay a foundation I'm sure some contemporary devs don't even realize needed to be built by anyone.
- jarjoura 4mo ago
  I know at my company our leadership was quite indifferent to how AI was adopted and really relied on the ground level engineers to determine what AI was good for and how we can best make use of it. It was the engineers at the ground floor who I watched become religious about it. They have been the ones pushing for deeper and deeper tooling. They have been the ones convincing leadership that this is the future and so now, well, it's leadership who is saying, we want more adoption. This psychosis is happening at every level in our industry, and this isn't a big tech, or leadership problem. It's all our problems.
  - fn-mote 4mo ago
    I don’t think it’s psychosis if the ground level people are using it effectively. That’s just the reality of having / wanting good tools.
- Schlagbohrer 4mo ago
  I'm actually worried that as AI gets smarter and more capable, it will become able to induce AI psychosis in even more people. Either accidentally or on purpose, I have no idea about that part.
- junior44660 4mo ago
  The examples you give aren't exactly inspiring.
torben-friis 4mo ago
I think it's just one more show of how addicted to the algorithm people are. The difference here is that this particular wave of propaganda hits people whose actions have deep effects on their industries, so their unreasonable actions are far more visible.
- mlsu 4mo ago
  I haven't seen anyone really talking about this, but we've seen many very public and powerful people have what is objectively a psychotic break, due to the content algorithm, AI, or both. We already know what the algorithm does to normal people - it should be treated like a radioactive object by anyone in charge of anything. Very powerful and strictly used judiciously and in small doses. Instead we've got some of the most powerful people on earth just cooking their brains on this shit just like anyone else watching reels on the bus.
  - Avicebron 4mo ago
    The mistake is thinking "the most powerful people on earth" aren't just like anyone else. Maybe we should tackle the "wealth is transcendence" psychosis first.
  - kokanee 4mo ago
    I've definitely seen some articles on the topic of AI psychosis among executives. I think there's something about being in a position of power that makes the sycophancy really psychologically dangerous.
- echelon 4mo ago
  It's not propaganda. It's a market trying to find the new low energy state. This stuff is putting an expiration date on your domain experience, and leadership is salivating at the chance to cut OpEx. At bare minimum, every PM is soon going to be able to do your work. That's a huge talent pool to draw from. This also opens the door to easy offshoring. They'll use layoffs to get rid of the existing high salary earners and backfill with new hires earning 70%, then 50%, then... I can't believe how many of you are absolutely certain you're going to be working in software in ten years. Let alone five.
dlev_pika 4mo ago
The irony is that I’d totally test out replacing the CEO with AI - best bang for buck by a million miles
- matheusmoreira 4mo ago
  Me too. I bet AIs could run a company much better than all of those lavishly paid CEOs. Can't wait for Cyberpunk's Delamain to become a reality.
  - monkpit 4mo ago
    Who controls the prompt? Shareholders? And how do you have confidence that the prompt is being used? Just thinking out loud, it’s an interesting idea (even if it might be terrible and dystopian).
    - arkis22 4mo ago
      Based on existing corporate hierarchy it would probably be the board of directors. There would be some sort of collaboration service where managers/agents push up problems and solutions to the board and they vote yes or no
      - dlt713705 4mo ago
        Can't the board of directors be replaced by a board of AI ?
        arkis22 4mo ago
        Sure, but that's not really the point as long as we exist in a world where the ultimate responsibility rests on humans. The alternative is skynet
        fn-mote 4mo ago
        Yes, if you don’t believe the board ever exercises effective restraint or holds effective responsibility. Which I understand people believe, but at least consider the possibility of the CEO being fired (and staying fired) by the board.
jcgrillo 4mo ago
> this kind of AI psychosis might be the new normal for our industry, or at least one of the new normals That's possible, but don't underestimate the cleansing power of a huge market crash. I don't know how it'll shake out, nobody does, but I'd bet in a few years hardly anyone will be looking back on the gung-ho AI thoughtleadering of 2026 as anything other than a stain on history.
- to11mtm 4mo ago
  IDK, I think overall it will be more like the 'SAAS' and 'Low Code' waves than the 'Blockchain' fever dreams I've heard in my career. Something that can be useful but being over-reliant on especially at a management level, could be disastrous.
  - jcgrillo 4mo ago
    It seems at this rate to avoid a large tech crash in the near future we need to start seeing real, transformative value being delivered by AI. Like, the promises are coming due. From where I sit, I don't see that happening. That's bad news. If it goes as bad as it might, it will affect many more people than just technologists. Most people's one and only experience with AI will be when it fails to deliver and wipes out their 401(k). That scenario, I think, would leave a pretty bad smell around AI. If otoh the industry does find a way to make it print, or if I'm just totally wrong, this won't happen. I hope that's the case.
majormajor 4mo ago
Even simpler, I think Meta—like many other companies before it, but most relevantly Twitter as an example of one that blew up its org recently—was likely massively over-hired and over-complexifying things, with too many toes in too many ponds. The look-at-this-crazy-revenue-faucet period resulted in a LOT of constant hiring for a solid decade. That's not the way towards an efficient org. So even if they fuck over 70% of their expeienced staff and are left with a relative skeleton crew, they'll likely be able to keep the lights on and keep the advertising-revenue-faucet running for years. And... given that they've mostly failed to break much of any new ground despite all the previous hiring, the rest of the world probably won't care. (Plus, as the article itself notes, Meta has long had a pretty toxic perf-review culture; speculation about if that has to do with the lack of any particularly noteworthy new products/features/etc is left to the reader ;) )
- ralph84 4mo ago
  The over-hiring was a deliberate strategy to keep talent comfortable on the sidelines instead of working for startups that could potentially grow into competitors. Any talent that escaped containment was quickly acqui-hired to get them back in the paddock.
  - disgruntledphd2 4mo ago
    Nah, in Facebooks case it was more that they scaled engineering as they scaled sales. Which is absurd, because sales is linear whereas engineering is sublinear.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
asveikau 4mo ago
I also read another lesson from this. The performance review system was already broken in the pre-AI golden age the article describes. Lines of code written and individual impact should not have been the goal. Team cohesion, architectural cohesion, building things that make actual sense are what you want.
smrtinsert 4mo ago
the new normal for our industry Not really. This level of toxic is definitely just Meta.
_heimdall 4mo ago
Token leaderboards are a ridiculous idea, but I'm also not surprised. Over the years leaders have tried tracking lines of code committed, total commits, etc. It always boils down to disconnected leadership that needs quantified metrics to watch because they don't know their front line employees and don't understand the work actually being done. Statistics really is a bitch.
- skydhash 4mo ago
  > It always boils down to disconnected leadership that needs quantified metrics to watch because they don't know their front line employees and don't understand the work actually being done. Sometimes they do know the work being done and how it makes them money. But they want MOORE and having engineers putting dampers on their latest wishes (this will break prod, what are the requirements,...) is something they truly dislike.
- hibikir 4mo ago
  I once worked at a place where a VP in charge of software teams would look at sprint reports in JIRA, and complained if the burndown charts didn't look similar to the sample, ideal trendline. Managers would be chewed up when their team didn't have a pretty enough chart. So you might not be surprised to hear that ultimately the tickets were doctored to meet the demands of the chart, whether any actual work actually ever closed when the ticket said.
- stanac 4mo ago
  > Token leaderboards are a ridiculous idea We have this at work, it's insane. Today I used opus high thinking to write a jira ticket for simple API endpoint. Every code change, every bug fix, every single code review, I have to utilize AI because managers will complain how we are not using AI enough. Every single person in my team have performance goal to increase AI usage. At least meta will use employee prompts to train an LLM, so maybe it makes sense for them in the long run. We are not training models, only consuming external LLMs.
siraris 4mo ago
So I worked for a year and a half at an AI startup that was way ahead of the curve on leveraging LLM's and other generative models. Like way ahead. I lost my job there months ago, but I can tell you that the AI psychosis is real and I watched it before a lot of the rest of the world. Maybe the CEO was always like this, but he went from being a likable, and liked person, to a fucking maniac. Multiple people who had worked with him for years that he brought on, were either fired or quit. One person who quit - who I would literally walk into the pits of hell for - told him straight up that he didn't know what happened to him, but he did not want to work with this version of the person he knew. I survived 3 layoffs before getting laid off, and you should see what they are producing now. If I didn't care about alienating myself from a lot of people, I'd share a link. It's honestly a mad king situation now. He's surrounded by a couple of sycophants - some of the most disliked, toxic people at the company, and who I've had the pleasure of working with - and the company is going down in flames. I 100% can see this being the case not only with Zuck, but with many other companies. I am flabbergasted that I am a lowly peon in the machine, and yet unless I'm missing something, I seem to be a lot smarter than most of the people I see running these companies. I honestly feel like someone in the future is going to write a Greek tragedy about this time, because it's going to get real bad very soon
- itemize123 4mo ago
  what decisions did the CEO do that you would believe is poor? Just conceptually if examples are make you too easily identifiable - iam purely curious.
- intended 4mo ago
  How much real productivity gains do you think people saw. I know that lines of codes and PRs go up, but how much of that actually moves the needle forward?
  - jbs789 4mo ago
    If the company is going down in flames I’d say that’s a loss in productivity.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
willXare 4mo ago
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crystal_revenge 4mo ago

> AI psychosis might be the new normal for our industry I've been fortunate enough to have worked on multiple AI intensive engineering teams (both on the product and research side) where considerable effort was spent reasoning through how AI was changing things and we were consistently evolving our practices. But they've all been orgs with 50 people less. AI psychosis seems to effect very large tech orgs in a different way than small, high impact teams. In small startups, at the end of the day, if the team doesn't ship a quality product, the company fails. Most importantly, every individual still bares the responsibility of their work. Personally, I've seen a lot of thoughtfulness around things like bad PRs because, on good teams, people realize we're all struggling to figure this out. But nonetheless, if something doesn't go well, there's always an individual that needs to figure out how to make it better. Virtually all the things I've learned about functionally shipping products built with and using AI have come from teams like this. Software engineering is changing, but for those of us shipping products, it reminds me a lot of the early webdev days when we were all trying to figure out the patterns to make this new world of software work reliably (anyone who recalls the pre-jQuery JavaScript days will remember how much we had to figure out before webdev could become what is today). In large tech orgs there's a much, much larger disconnect between employee effort and concrete value delivered and similarly much larger diffusion of responsibility. When accountability is abstract and nobody is quite sure what the real value of their work is, then there is fertile ground for AI psychosis to run amok. In part this is because there is a certain latent psychosis in these larger orgs anyway; who's "productive" and what's "valuable" always requires a bit of imaginative story telling, not necessarily grounded in reality. However, I don't think this will persist long as the "new normal". Just like in the rise of web application development, smaller teams will charge ahead and figure some of this stuff out. The MVC pattern applied to webapps, increasingly powerful JavaScript frameworks and best practices, agile practices, git and the popularization of github, the use of No SQL for scaling etc all primarily where battled tested by smaller, high velocity startups and now lay a foundation I'm sure some contemporary devs don't even realize needed to be built by anyone.

jarjoura 4mo ago
I know at my company our leadership was quite indifferent to how AI was adopted and really relied on the ground level engineers to determine what AI was good for and how we can best make use of it. It was the engineers at the ground floor who I watched become religious about it. They have been the ones pushing for deeper and deeper tooling. They have been the ones convincing leadership that this is the future and so now, well, it's leadership who is saying, we want more adoption. This psychosis is happening at every level in our industry, and this isn't a big tech, or leadership problem. It's all our problems.
- fn-mote 4mo ago
  I don’t think it’s psychosis if the ground level people are using it effectively. That’s just the reality of having / wanting good tools.
Schlagbohrer 4mo ago
I'm actually worried that as AI gets smarter and more capable, it will become able to induce AI psychosis in even more people. Either accidentally or on purpose, I have no idea about that part.
junior44660 4mo ago
The examples you give aren't exactly inspiring.

torben-friis 4mo ago

I think it's just one more show of how addicted to the algorithm people are. The difference here is that this particular wave of propaganda hits people whose actions have deep effects on their industries, so their unreasonable actions are far more visible.

mlsu 4mo ago
I haven't seen anyone really talking about this, but we've seen many very public and powerful people have what is objectively a psychotic break, due to the content algorithm, AI, or both. We already know what the algorithm does to normal people - it should be treated like a radioactive object by anyone in charge of anything. Very powerful and strictly used judiciously and in small doses. Instead we've got some of the most powerful people on earth just cooking their brains on this shit just like anyone else watching reels on the bus.
- Avicebron 4mo ago
  The mistake is thinking "the most powerful people on earth" aren't just like anyone else. Maybe we should tackle the "wealth is transcendence" psychosis first.
- kokanee 4mo ago
  I've definitely seen some articles on the topic of AI psychosis among executives. I think there's something about being in a position of power that makes the sycophancy really psychologically dangerous.
echelon 4mo ago
It's not propaganda. It's a market trying to find the new low energy state. This stuff is putting an expiration date on your domain experience, and leadership is salivating at the chance to cut OpEx. At bare minimum, every PM is soon going to be able to do your work. That's a huge talent pool to draw from. This also opens the door to easy offshoring. They'll use layoffs to get rid of the existing high salary earners and backfill with new hires earning 70%, then 50%, then... I can't believe how many of you are absolutely certain you're going to be working in software in ten years. Let alone five.

dlev_pika 4mo ago

The irony is that I’d totally test out replacing the CEO with AI - best bang for buck by a million miles

matheusmoreira 4mo ago
Me too. I bet AIs could run a company much better than all of those lavishly paid CEOs. Can't wait for Cyberpunk's Delamain to become a reality.
- monkpit 4mo ago
  Who controls the prompt? Shareholders? And how do you have confidence that the prompt is being used? Just thinking out loud, it’s an interesting idea (even if it might be terrible and dystopian).
  - arkis22 4mo ago
    Based on existing corporate hierarchy it would probably be the board of directors. There would be some sort of collaboration service where managers/agents push up problems and solutions to the board and they vote yes or no
    - dlt713705 4mo ago
      Can't the board of directors be replaced by a board of AI ?
      - arkis22 4mo ago
        Sure, but that's not really the point as long as we exist in a world where the ultimate responsibility rests on humans. The alternative is skynet
      - fn-mote 4mo ago
        Yes, if you don’t believe the board ever exercises effective restraint or holds effective responsibility. Which I understand people believe, but at least consider the possibility of the CEO being fired (and staying fired) by the board.

jcgrillo 4mo ago

> this kind of AI psychosis might be the new normal for our industry, or at least one of the new normals That's possible, but don't underestimate the cleansing power of a huge market crash. I don't know how it'll shake out, nobody does, but I'd bet in a few years hardly anyone will be looking back on the gung-ho AI thoughtleadering of 2026 as anything other than a stain on history.

to11mtm 4mo ago
IDK, I think overall it will be more like the 'SAAS' and 'Low Code' waves than the 'Blockchain' fever dreams I've heard in my career. Something that can be useful but being over-reliant on especially at a management level, could be disastrous.
- jcgrillo 4mo ago
  It seems at this rate to avoid a large tech crash in the near future we need to start seeing real, transformative value being delivered by AI. Like, the promises are coming due. From where I sit, I don't see that happening. That's bad news. If it goes as bad as it might, it will affect many more people than just technologists. Most people's one and only experience with AI will be when it fails to deliver and wipes out their 401(k). That scenario, I think, would leave a pretty bad smell around AI. If otoh the industry does find a way to make it print, or if I'm just totally wrong, this won't happen. I hope that's the case.

majormajor 4mo ago

Even simpler, I think Meta—like many other companies before it, but most relevantly Twitter as an example of one that blew up its org recently—was likely massively over-hired and over-complexifying things, with too many toes in too many ponds. The look-at-this-crazy-revenue-faucet period resulted in a LOT of constant hiring for a solid decade. That's not the way towards an efficient org. So even if they fuck over 70% of their expeienced staff and are left with a relative skeleton crew, they'll likely be able to keep the lights on and keep the advertising-revenue-faucet running for years. And... given that they've mostly failed to break much of any new ground despite all the previous hiring, the rest of the world probably won't care. (Plus, as the article itself notes, Meta has long had a pretty toxic perf-review culture; speculation about if that has to do with the lack of any particularly noteworthy new products/features/etc is left to the reader ;) )

ralph84 4mo ago
The over-hiring was a deliberate strategy to keep talent comfortable on the sidelines instead of working for startups that could potentially grow into competitors. Any talent that escaped containment was quickly acqui-hired to get them back in the paddock.
- disgruntledphd2 4mo ago
  Nah, in Facebooks case it was more that they scaled engineering as they scaled sales. Which is absurd, because sales is linear whereas engineering is sublinear.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]

asveikau 4mo ago

I also read another lesson from this. The performance review system was already broken in the pre-AI golden age the article describes. Lines of code written and individual impact should not have been the goal. Team cohesion, architectural cohesion, building things that make actual sense are what you want.

smrtinsert 4mo ago

the new normal for our industry Not really. This level of toxic is definitely just Meta.

_heimdall 4mo ago

Token leaderboards are a ridiculous idea, but I'm also not surprised. Over the years leaders have tried tracking lines of code committed, total commits, etc. It always boils down to disconnected leadership that needs quantified metrics to watch because they don't know their front line employees and don't understand the work actually being done. Statistics really is a bitch.

skydhash 4mo ago
> It always boils down to disconnected leadership that needs quantified metrics to watch because they don't know their front line employees and don't understand the work actually being done. Sometimes they do know the work being done and how it makes them money. But they want MOORE and having engineers putting dampers on their latest wishes (this will break prod, what are the requirements,...) is something they truly dislike.
hibikir 4mo ago
I once worked at a place where a VP in charge of software teams would look at sprint reports in JIRA, and complained if the burndown charts didn't look similar to the sample, ideal trendline. Managers would be chewed up when their team didn't have a pretty enough chart. So you might not be surprised to hear that ultimately the tickets were doctored to meet the demands of the chart, whether any actual work actually ever closed when the ticket said.
stanac 4mo ago
> Token leaderboards are a ridiculous idea We have this at work, it's insane. Today I used opus high thinking to write a jira ticket for simple API endpoint. Every code change, every bug fix, every single code review, I have to utilize AI because managers will complain how we are not using AI enough. Every single person in my team have performance goal to increase AI usage. At least meta will use employee prompts to train an LLM, so maybe it makes sense for them in the long run. We are not training models, only consuming external LLMs.

siraris 4mo ago

So I worked for a year and a half at an AI startup that was way ahead of the curve on leveraging LLM's and other generative models. Like way ahead. I lost my job there months ago, but I can tell you that the AI psychosis is real and I watched it before a lot of the rest of the world. Maybe the CEO was always like this, but he went from being a likable, and liked person, to a fucking maniac. Multiple people who had worked with him for years that he brought on, were either fired or quit. One person who quit - who I would literally walk into the pits of hell for - told him straight up that he didn't know what happened to him, but he did not want to work with this version of the person he knew. I survived 3 layoffs before getting laid off, and you should see what they are producing now. If I didn't care about alienating myself from a lot of people, I'd share a link. It's honestly a mad king situation now. He's surrounded by a couple of sycophants - some of the most disliked, toxic people at the company, and who I've had the pleasure of working with - and the company is going down in flames. I 100% can see this being the case not only with Zuck, but with many other companies. I am flabbergasted that I am a lowly peon in the machine, and yet unless I'm missing something, I seem to be a lot smarter than most of the people I see running these companies. I honestly feel like someone in the future is going to write a Greek tragedy about this time, because it's going to get real bad very soon

itemize123 4mo ago
what decisions did the CEO do that you would believe is poor? Just conceptually if examples are make you too easily identifiable - iam purely curious.
intended 4mo ago
How much real productivity gains do you think people saw. I know that lines of codes and PRs go up, but how much of that actually moves the needle forward?
- jbs789 4mo ago
  If the company is going down in flames I’d say that’s a loss in productivity.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

willXare 4mo ago

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