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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

#471

Post by skydhash »

kakugawa wrote: post #94
Utkarsh_Mood wrote: post #84

Earlier 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…

> Treat my claims as hypotheses, not decisions. Before agreeing with a proposed change, state the strongest case against it. [...]Say hard things plainly, then soften if needed — not the other way around. For drafting, brainstorming, or casual questions, ease off and match the task.

All I really take from this is that apparently some people can't follow through with the scientific method.

People who I interact with and who do like AI tools usually recoils at questioning any of their first idea and its validity. You can easily find out when there is a bug and you ask them for hypothesis and where to focus. You will see in real time the blank look of incomprehension settling in.

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

#474

Post by tns_admin »

shridharxp wrote: post #423
foxfired wrote: post #260

Maybe this is what will turn software engineering into an Engineering field. Right know, prompters are setting up whole company infrastructure. I personally know one. He migrated the companies database to a newer Postgres version. He was successful in the end, but I was gnawing my teeth when he described every step of the process. It sounded like "And then, I poured gasoline on the servers while smoking a cigarette.…

As a junior dev there is this pressure to produce code, add features, and investigate bugs within unprecedented time period. I know whole code base is fking up but i will still add that feature or do a sloppy bug fix without digging deeper.

In my experience, AI really lowered the bar for bad code in the name of delivering faster.

I have seen people write highly complex code where all the complexity was not necessary. Think: deep unnecessary branching, pointless error handling and retries which make no sense in our context, hand-coded parsing using regexps, haphazard data flow, functions which seem purely computational but slyly make API calls, pointlessly nullable model fields, verbose doc comments which describe the implementation instead of the contract. I could go on.

The worst part is, even when "prompted" by bad coders, it works in the end. Even has tests (ostensibly mock-ridden, a pet peeve of mine which always falls on deaf ears). So I cannot reject the PR without being an asshole.

I am no luddite. I make heavy use of AI, with all the skills / AGENTS.md / style guides and clear specs, then review every line of code, prefer testing with minimal mocking. I'd even say with right prompting, it can write better low level code than me (eg: anticipating common error conditions).

But my biggest fear about AI is how it enables normies with little to no understanding of CS principles to produce code faster which looks correct but slowly poisons the codebase.

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

#476

Post by jeffrallen »

pmontra wrote: post #425
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…

What I'm seeing is a little eternal September of support tickets about programs that fail to interface the JSON API of a customer of mine. The API is always allucinated. In the best case there are out of place attributes. Often they don't exist at all. I've seen x, y, width, height when we have only top and left. Of course no human read the documentation. Those are probably founders vibe coding a client without the t…

> Probably they copy and paste my reply to their bots.

You must not give in to the temptation to mention pirate talk, Klingon, or goblins.

But now that I've put the seed in your mind, you probably (hopefully) will. :)

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

#477

Post by trinsic2 »

vividfrier wrote: post #440

[flagged]

I think this divide has something to do with the way people are using these tools. I do a lot of planning in my documents and I rarely use conversations accept to interate on something I wrote instructions for.

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

#478

Post by thefourthchime »

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”?

Yes. And as the models get better, it works better. But at one point you do have to understand the code because it's also just guessing as to what your actual intentions are.

It doesn't know what mess you want to clean up. A lot of times AI just starts making up new patterns on top of other patterns and having backwards compatibility between the two. How does it know which one you actually like?

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