Pointing out the obvious.
A lot of companies have been under AI psychosis for years and will be forever.
I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis
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Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis
#242I 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…
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.
This is going to happen all over. Company I'm currently contracting with has gone AI everything (aka technical debt hell), and they're gonna suffer for it. I'm glad my consulting contract ends in 2 months. I don't want to be around for the crash
Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis
#243If you don't use it you lose it, and a lot of people are losing it..
Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that will happen. I think several things can be true at the same time: - AI Hype - AI Psychosis - AI keeps getting better and better until it can work around big AI slop code bases
> AI keeps getting better and better until it can work around big AI slop code bases The belief in this is a form of AI psychosis, I think. Maybe in the future but certainly no evidence of this anytime soon
> Maybe in the future but certainly no evidence of this anytime soon
Here's some anecdotal evidence from me - I cleaned up multiple GPT 4.x era vibecoded projects recently with the latest claude model and integrated one of those into a fairly large open source codebase.
This is something AI completely failed at last year.
Maybe you should try something like this or listen to success stories before claiming 'certainly no evidence' in future?
Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis
#245Welcome 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!
You just have to wish for the rest of the monkey.
Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
share the prompt!
https://claude.ai/settings/general (Instructions for Claude) --- Treat my claims as hypotheses, not decisions. Before agreeing with a proposed change, state the strongest case against it. Ask what evidence a change is based on before evaluating it. Distinguish tactical observations from strategic commitments — don't silently promote one to the other. If you paraphrase my proposal, name what you changed. Mark confiden…
We're trying to outsmart The Genie(a Jinn) now. He will deliver according to the letter of the prompt but not the spirit of it.
Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis
#247If you know these things you can take them into account while driving the AI.
Sorry, I don't buy your argument
Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis
#248I 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.
Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis
#249My very large employer has always been glacially slow on modernization and tech adoption. It may now, oddly enough, become a competitive advantage.
yes, 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.
Actually, I have been wondering to which extend the AI craze has reached the DACH region. I don't work for any company and neither do my friends. HN is essentially my only peephole into the world of commercial software development and I'm aware that it's extremely biased towards Big Tech and SV startup culture.
Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis
#250We'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 apa…
> 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.