AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot • Hacker News Board

Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot

#111

Post by rwmj » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 6:46 AM UTC

episteme wrote: post #92

Manfrednotfunny wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C* can mean anything. The CTO of my last company thought that an API request under 1 second is okay as the customer at that endpoint wouldn't mind anything under 1 second. I explained to him that under 1 second for this particular task is crazy high. He explained to me that it works fine as it is and its only one customer (the company customer) complaines to him about this issue every few month. I fixed the SQL query…

Sounds like the CTO is right though? Why prioritize this? Surely there are way more important things to do. You are judging him for not thinking it’s important because you said so, that’s not strong argument.

If the CTO was right about the premise it'd be fine, but much more likely he pulled the "everyone is happy with 1s" out of his arse and then used his position/authority to bully the team.

Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot

#112

Post by Manfrednotfunny » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 9:25 AM UTC

episteme wrote: post #92

Manfrednotfunny wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C* can mean anything. The CTO of my last company thought that an API request under 1 second is okay as the customer at that endpoint wouldn't mind anything under 1 second. I explained to him that under 1 second for this particular task is crazy high. He explained to me that it works fine as it is and its only one customer (the company customer) complaines to him about this issue every few month. I fixed the SQL query…

Sounds like the CTO is right though? Why prioritize this? Surely there are way more important things to do. You are judging him for not thinking it’s important because you said so, that’s not strong argument.

No he was not.

The fix was a few hours, the customer called him regularly. The CTO had no understanding that a basic SQL Insert shouldn't take a second.

This fix smoothed all response times on all queries and that customer never called aabout this issue again.

Re: AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot

#113

Post by aduffy » Sat, Aug 08, 2026, 11:38 AM UTC

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #93

thechao wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Models are excellent at code Models are infinitely willing to code. The code they produce makes me want to pour one out for Knuth.

Yeah, models aren't good at code any more than they are good at people. They turn it out very fast, but that isn't actually useful when the code needs to be carefully reviewed to find the land mines and questionable design decisions.

This was true six months ago but today models are indeed excellent at coding especially if you give them guidance.