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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

#391

Post by rethab »

agnosticmantis wrote: post #383

> I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. What's the historical context for this MTBF vs. MTTR reckoning?

Before the cloud, people were trying to reduce the mean time between failure (MTBF) essentially trying to prevent a thing from failing. With cloud, people are trying to recover as quickly as possible (mean time to recovery) accepting that things will fail —- it’s about how fast you can react to it.

John Allspaw (previously CTO at Etsy) has written about this: https://www.kitchensoap.com/2010/11/07/mttr-mtbf-for-most-ty...

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

#392

Post by jimbokun »

kiba wrote: post #327
jimbokun wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No.

Younger implies cheaper.

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

#393

Post by jimbokun »

digitaltrees wrote: post #294
jimbokun wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes but most people won’t.

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

#394

Post by fallat »

rDr4g0n wrote: post #296
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…

Can concur. I would say I am doing 3 things per day now instead of 1.

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

#396

Post by jimbokun »

monkpit wrote: post #323
jimbokun wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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??

Yes.

There is a lot of absurdly complex software that runs with high reliability. We hear a lot about the ones that don’t.

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

#397

Post by sebmellen »

bastawhiz wrote: post #386
agnosticmantis wrote: post #383

> I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. What's the historical context for this MTBF vs. MTTR reckoning?

If you optimize for MTBF, you optimize for it to be a long time between failures. You optimize for the system not going down in the first place, but when it does do down it might be Pretty Bad. If you optimize for MTTR, you don't care how often you go down and instead optimize your recovery time to be as short as possible. The concepts are pre-computing.

Not the GP commenter, but I'm still struggling to understand how this relates to the AI world, or perhaps more importantly, what the historical context was. Did people end up switching to MTTR optimization over MTBF optimization? If so, is the implication that the recovery times got lower but software instability went up as a result?

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

#399

Post by GrumpyYoungMan »

leeoniya wrote: post #16

> "no no, it has full test coverage" i don't have enough fingers (and toes) to count how many times i've demonstrated that "100% coverage" is almost universally bullshit.

There's a very old paper by Cem Kaner about the meaninglessness of "100% coverage" where he included an appendix where he enumerates 101 different possible types of code coverage: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/243782285_Software_...

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

#400

Post by zamalek »

weinzierl wrote: post #4

"its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" Hmm, I agree with the point OP is making, but I'm not so sure this is the best supporting argument. The bottleneck is finding the bugs and if he'd criticized people saying AI will be the panacea to that I'd be with him, but people saying agents are fast and good at fixing human found bugs is nothing I'd object to. Agen…

> Agents are fixing bugs so quickly and at a scale humans can't do already.

This is an illusion, I assure you. On a side project of mine with behavior that's very hard to translate into an algorithm (never mind code), after a few failed attempts between the both of us, I figured it out. I gave the AI (Opus) an extremely specific algorithm with detailed tests. All completely and utterly ignored (including the tests), like I never even said it. It proudly declared the work done without ever having written the tests that would have proved that wrong - it basically wrote code that didn't change behavior at all, it just gave the illusion of looking busy.

That's just a single extreme example that comes to mind, but I've had it ignore me at least 4-5 times a day this week.

If you think agents are fixing things reliably then you simply haven't noticed that they are "looking busy."

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