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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

#271

Post by jcgrillo »

derektank wrote: post #156
kristjansson wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you just prompt the AI and believe what it tell you then you have AI psychosis This is the right definition. LLM outputs have undefined truth value. They’re mechanized Frankfurtian Bullshiters. Which can be valuable! If you have the tools or taste to filter the things that happen to be true from the rest of the dross. However! We need a nicer word for it. Suggesting someone has “AI psychosis” feels a bit too imp…

I wouldn’t say they have an undefined truth value. Their source of truth is their training data. The problem is that human text is not tightly coupled to the capital T truth.

Nor is the LLM output tightly coupled to the training data. They'll "eagerly"[1] fill in the blanks wherever it sounds good.

[1] here I don't mean to imply agency, just vigor.

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

#272

Post by jimbokun »

zmmmmm wrote: post #113

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…

Those design principles it will take us 20 years to learn are just the principles for writing good maintainable, debug-able, understandable code today. Will just take 20 years to figure out they still apply when AI writes the code, too.

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

#273

Post by Glyptodon »

That people don't realize full test coverage just means every line is hit, not that everything is correct is always funny to me. (I don't view as an argument against tests, but with AI it's especially important as if you're aren't careful it'll be very happy to make coverage that is not quite right.)

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

#274

Post by ashdksnndck »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #216
kilroy123 wrote: post #184

Earlier 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

I have personally had success telling Claude that some AI-written system is too complicated and ask it to rewrite it in a more logical way. This sometimes results in thousands of lines of code being deleted. I give an instruction like that if I see certain red flags, eg:

1) same business logic implemented in two different places, with extra code to sync between them

2) fixing apparently simple bugs results in lots of new code being written

It’s a sign I need to at least temporarily dedicate more effort to overseeing work in that area.

I somewhat agree with the AI psychosis framing of the OP. It takes some taste and discipline to avoid letting things dissolve into complete slop.

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

#275

Post by jimbokun »

leoc wrote: post #124
zmmmmm wrote: post #113

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…

> 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 more defects than they close and the whole system will be unstable. Wow, it’s true, AI really is set to match human performance on large, complex software systems! ;)

Humans who have been writing systems like that for many years know how to maintain and modify them successfully. It’s just that our industry has a bias towards youth who don’t think they have anything to learn from those who came before them.

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

#276

Post by fooker »

dullcrisp wrote: post #231
fooker wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might not pan out to be the glorious victory of human craft as you’re imagining it to be. Here’s a slightly different future - these AI rescue consultants are bots too, just trained for this purpose. Plausible? I have already experienced claude 4.7 handle pretty complex refactors without issues. Scale and correctness aren’t even 1% of the issue it was last year. You just have to get the high level design right,…

And the bots training the bots are just bots that were trained to train bots?

Nothing that sexy, just thirty odd years of software engineering data from humans.

Commits, design reviews, whitepapers, code reviews, test suites. And pretty concerning : chat logs and even keystrokes from employees nowadays.

The way we train specialized bots now is incredibly inefficient, that part is rapidly improving.

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

#277

Post by jimbokun »

ramoz wrote: post #135
zmmmmm wrote: post #113

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…

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.

I hope you have quoted him a very very high hourly rate.

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

#278

Post by rDr4g0n »

Aurornis wrote: post #149
impulser_ wrote: post #48

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…

Several people I know have already gone through phases like this. When you're doing it alone there is a moderating factor when their friends and family start calling them out on their behavior or weird things they say. I can't imagine how bad it would be if your employer started doing this from the leadership. You'd be pressured to get on board or fear getting fired. Nobody would be trying to moderate your thinking e…

this is exactly what is happening. instead of building true AI culture around thoughtful adoption of AI strengths while defending against weaknesses, they're coming up with bullshit heuristics like "every repo has a CLAUDE.md", watching private token usage dashboards, and terrorizing everyone into doing it (or lose your job).

this leads to naive AI adoption, which is the worst of both worlds (no real speedup, out sourcing thinking, ai slop PRs, skill rot).

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

#279

Post by 3form »

ramoz wrote: post #135
zmmmmm wrote: post #113

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…

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.

Wow. This is like every other gold rush. Millions will walk into the ice and snow, somehow not questioning that their ability to dig is not unique.

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

#280

Post by ttoinou »

jimbokun wrote: post #275
leoc wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 more defects than they close and the whole system will be unstable. Wow, it’s true, AI really is set to match human performance on large, complex software systems! ;)

Humans who have been writing systems like that for many years know how to maintain and modify them successfully. It’s just that our industry has a bias towards youth who don’t think they have anything to learn from those who came before them.

How do you explain to a junior this pile of messy code isn’t crap but is actually years of integrated knowledge ? That the most common principles discussed in computer science (OOP, SOLID, DRY etc.) are actually just little guides that aren’t to be taken to the extremes ?
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