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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

#321

Post by teeray »

taffydavid wrote: post #22

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!"

My prediction is that in the next year, we’ll start to see some dismantling of code review at some companies. It might take the form of “AI-only review,” or something similar, but many companies are getting frustrated with developers saying “no” to immediately merging slop they can barely understand.

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

#322

Post by ethbr1 »

abhiyerra wrote: post #188
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…

Heh. Got a customer recently around this. Entire infrastructure and CI/CD vibecoded. They half implemented Kubernetes in Github Actions that were several thousand lines long and impossible to understand. I think the problem will get worst. I dislike the marketing around AI, but I do think it is a useful tool to help those who have experience move faster. If you are not an expert, AI seems to create a complex solution…

> If you are not an expert, AI seems to create a complex solution to whatever it is you were trying to do.

I've been watching non-developers vibe code stuff, and the general failure mode seems to be ignorance of 3-pick-2 tradeoffs.

They'll spam "make it more reliable" or some such, and AI will best-effort add more intermediary redis caches or similar patterns.

But because the vibe coders don't actually know what a redis cache is or how it works, they'll never make the architectural trade-offs to truly fix things.

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

#323

Post by monkpit »

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.

> Humans who have been writing systems like that for many years know how to maintain and modify them successfully.

Do they??

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

#324

Post by thr0w »

Hard to have sober talk about this since a lot of discourse is AI psychosis vs. AI naysayers. Does software quality seem to have taken a jump in the past few years to anyone? Not to me, seems to be getting worse. Think that's a decent signal. Can tell you I'm dealing with a non-technical VP who loves blast submitting vibe-coded PRs and while there's some quick wins, overall quality is bad, and we had our first real production outage that Claude one-shot caused but could not one-shot solve.

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

#325

Post by TheGrassyKnoll »

mikestorrent wrote: post #295
3form wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The shovel sellers are ringing the cash register.

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

#326

Post by jcalx »

orev wrote: post #129
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…

As the models keep improving, wouldn’t you be able to task a newer AI to “clean up this mess”?

Someone responded to a previous comment of mine [0] positing a Peter principle [1] of slopcoding — it will always be easier to tack on a new feature than to understand a whole system and clean it up. The equilibrium will remain at the point of near, but not total, codebase incomprehensibility.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48037128#48038639

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

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

#327

Post by kiba »

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.

Executive leadership bias older not younger, no?

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

#328

Post by djeastm »

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?

Maybe the professional devs, but not the vibecoders

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

#330

Post by sheepscreek »

I have respect for Mitchel and I’ve spent a good deal of time trying to think of ways to justify his message. I can’t. Either I am missing a big piece or he is worrying about something that comes naturally as more software gets developed (and sooner).

In any case, this is what blue-green deployments and gradual rollouts are for. With basic software engineering processes, you can make your end user experience pretty much bullet proof. Just pay EXTRA attention when touching DNS, network config (for core systems) and database migrations.

Distributed systems are a bit more tricky but k8s and the likes have pretty solid release mechanisms built-in. You are still doomed if your CDN provider goes down. You just have to draw a line somewhere and face the reality head on (for X cost per year this is the level of redundancy we get, but it won’t save us from Y).

The one thing I hadn’t mentioned - one I AM worried about - is security! I’ve been worried about it from before Mythos (basic prompt injection) and with more powerful models now team offence is stronger than ever.

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