161–170 of 1001 posts
My very large employer has always been glacially slow on modernization and tech adoption. It may now, oddly enough, become a competitive advantage.
Spoiler: it's not
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I 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.
You 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.
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.
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…
Correct. I use AI a ton and I'm having more fun every day than I ever did before thanks to it (on average, highs are higher, lows are lower). Your characterization is all very accurate. Thank you. Here's some other topics I've written on it: - https://mitchellh.com/writing/my-ai-adoption-journey - https://mitchellh.com/writing/building-block-economy - https://mitchellh.com/writing/simdutf-no-libcxx (complex change th…
Claiming that the people who disagree with you must be experiencing a form of psychosis, experiencing actual hallucinations and unable to tell what is real, is a weak ad hominem that comes off no better than calling them retarded or schizophrenic.
If you genuinely think one of your friends is going through a psychotic episode, you should be trying to get to them professional help. But don’t assume you can diagnose a human psyche just because you can diagnose a software bug.
I 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 m…
> Somewhere in the future, the new software engineering will be primarily about principles to avoid this in the first... It's really nowhere near as complicated as making distributed systems reliable. It's really quite simple: read a fucking book . Well, actually read a lot of books. And write a lot of software. And read a lot of software. And do your goddamn job , engineer. Be honest about what you know, what you kn…
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Spoiler: it's not
It is absolutely going to be a competitive advantage if it isn't already. When your competitors' products suck because they are using LLMs to write them, and yours work because you aren't, customers notice.
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> friends I’ve had who have done things like have a full on mourning session when a model updates because they lost a friend/lover I mean, isn't that the natural and expected response? An AI company sold them a relationship with a chatbot and at least some their social/romantic needs were being met by that product. When what they were paying for was taken from them and changed without warning into something that no l…
> I mean, isn't that the natural and expected response? An AI company sold them a relationship with a chatbot and at least some their social/romantic needs were being met by that product. When what they were paying for was taken from them and changed without warning into something that no longer filled that void in their life why wouldn't they morn the loss of that? Ah, I forgot about the ai relationship companies. N…
I do not believe 'AI psychosis' is an actual thing.
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A non-technical friend of mine has just won some hospital contracts after vibecoding w/ Claude an inventory management solution for them. They gave him access to IT dept servers and he called me extremely lost on how to deploy (cant connect Claude to them) and also frustrated because the app has some sort of interesting data/state issues.
What concerns me about this is that as these stories multiply and circulate people will just completely stop buying software/SAAS from startups, because 90% or more will be this same thing. It will completely kill the market.