Live data from Hacker News

I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

twitter.com

61–70 of 1001 posts

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#61
post #8

I'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.

This is the new normal. AI will continue to reduce the need for human workers until a Universal Basic Income is established. At the end of the day robots can do the vast vast majority of jobs better and faster. If not now, very soon. I only worry our economic systems won’t keep up

The exact same thing was meant to happen when the desktop computer became prevalent. Then the internet. Look at us now.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#62
post #19
post #8

I'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.

Well a 2008 and a 2000 level financial crash is required for this. It is always during euphoric levels of delusion such events then occur. ...and it also needs more so-called AI companies present in the wreckage in this crash. AI psychosis is undeniably real.

The entire stock market is undergoing AI psychosis.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#63

I'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 thinki…

He uses AI himself, so I agree he doesn't see AI use as black/white.

Hard agree about ideas, thinking, advice. AI's sycophancy is a huge subtle problem. I've tried my best to create a system prompt to guard against this w/ Opus 4.7. It doesn't adhere to it 100% of the time and the longer the conversation goes, the worse the sycophancy gets (because the system instructions become weaker and weaker). I have to actively look for and guard against sycophancy whenever I chat w/ Opus 4.7.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#64

This 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!"

I 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.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#65

Deprecating 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.

I'm not convinced. There's a ton of cost to adopting a radically different workflow.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#66
post #24

Bug 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.

I 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.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#68

I 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.

I'm guessing you've never heard of Hashicorp (Terraform, Vault) then? Mitchell == Hashicorp.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#70
I 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.

Post reply on HN