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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

#291

Post by spamizbad »

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…

What you're describing really isn't a new problem for organizations. Historically it's been a team of humans not using AI who gets over their skis and they have to have other more capable humans (also not using AI) to bail them out.

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

#292

Post by cybercatgurrl »

mcmcmc wrote: post #163
mitchellh wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hi Mitchell. Psychosis is a serious psychiatric condition that can be induced or triggered by AI. “AI psychosis” in this context is a misuse of a clinical term. Your tweet describes a disagreement on a value judgment that boils down to “move fast and break things” with high trust in AI outputs vs going all in on quality and reliability with low trust in AI. It’s an engineering tradeoff like any other. Claiming that t…

was looking for this comment. this post is highly inappropriate and very inaccurate. this should be at the top. too many people are throwing around the word psychosis without knowing what it means. if someone is truely going through psychosis you get them help!

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

#293

Post by insane_dreamer »

Just talked to an exec yesterday about their multinational company, where the newly-installed CEO just came in with "everyone needs to be using AI" and "we should be doing everything with AI".

I cautioned them that this a terrible idea -- you have business people who don't know what they're talking about, and all they know if "if we don't 'do AI' we'll be left behind because our competitors are 'doing AI'" (whatever tf "doing AI" means).

Yes, LLMs are a great tool. But they're not like some magic bullet you stick into everything. Use it where it makes sense, and treat it like you would other tools.

You make "doing AI" some kind of KPI in your org, and you're going to have people "doing AI" amazingly (LOC counts! tokens burned! tickets cleared!) while not actually being more productive, and potentially building something that is going to come down on your head for the next team to "clean up the AI mess".

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

#294

Post by digitaltrees »

jimbokun wrote: post #272
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.

No. You can use AI to code this way. I’ve successfully steered AI to implement good architecture by moving slowly and constantly course correcting

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

#295

Post by mikestorrent »

3form wrote: post #279
ramoz wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, selling shovels has always been a good way to deal with that problem

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

#296

Post by rDr4g0n »

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…

when you outsource thinking to AI, you get that magical speed up. the agent is making decisions for you, so things move at agent speed. it often makes decisions without telling you, and the final "here's the plan" output often requires you to understand the problem at great depth, which requires return to human speed, so you skim and just approve.

the trick is to be mindful, aware, and deliberate about what decisions are being outsourced. this requires slowing down, losing that absurd 10x vibe coding gain. in exchange, youre more "in-the-loop" and accumulate less cognitive debt.

find ways to let the agent make the boring decisions, like how to loop over some array, or how to adapt the output of one call into the input of another.

make the real decisions ahead of time. encode them into specs. define boundaries, apis, key data structures. identify systems and responsibilities. explicitly enumerate error handling. set hard constraints around security and PII.

tell the agent to halt on ambiguity.

a good engineer will get a 2x or 3x speedup without the downsides.

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

#297

Post by asveikau »

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

It's amusing to me that:

* A belief that AI will keep getting better, presented without evidence, does not yield a lot of skepticism around these parts.

* Your comment saying it is wrong to believe AI will keep getting better, also presented without evidence, is downvoted.

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

#299

Post by literalAardvark »

malfist wrote: post #171
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,…

> You just have to get the high level design right, or explicitly ask it critique your design before building it. Do you think people are not giving their agents specs and asking for input?

The ones who end up with messes, no

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

#300

Post by m463 »

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

I think it will be needless verbose complexity.

I kind of imagine someone having an unlimited budget of free amazon stuff shipped to their house.

In theory, they are living a prosperous life of plenty.

In reality, they will be drowning in something that isn't prosperity.

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