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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

#491

Post by throwaway2037 »

Daishiman wrote: post #481
dakolli wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic/OpenAI have been flooding this site with pro "AI" bots the last few weeks, this is for sure a pro-AI bot or employee from an "AI" company.

It may be the case. I've been around in the industry for 25 years and I barely code. I babysit multiple instances of Claude and we were very purposeful and deliberate in altering our workflows for it; we made our local dev environments capable of spinning up multiple instances to work from parallel worktrees. We added MCP servers to let LLMs observe our CI, Jira and deployments. Most of our time is spent doing spec w…

You had me until "manual QA". What is special about your product that your QA needs to be manual in 2026?

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

#493

Post by suttontom »

skydhash wrote: post #458
suzzer99 wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve had to do a ton of SQL stuff lately, which I haven’t really worked with since the late 90s. ChatGPT has been a godsend, not just for me, but for our only coworker who knows SQL well, whom I’d probably be bugging several times a day at my wits’ end. But no one cares about those kinds of productivity gains. Just the ones that will completely replace us.

I'm always amazed by those comments. Why couldn't you buy a book on SQL[0], and spend a week on it? Or just go over to YouTube for a refresher? [0]: Like https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/sql-queries-for/9780134...

I'm amazed you think that instead of using an LLM that someone will go buy a book and spend a week learning something that, judging by the fact that they last used it 30 years ago, likely won't be relevant for them soon.

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

#494

Post by Swizec »

techblueberry wrote: post #448
vividfrier wrote: post #440

[flagged]

To me the big thing I see in blog posts is this implication that “all software engineering best practices are out the window” And to me, AI should best be used to add rocket fuel to existing practices. Better tests, better observability, more atomic changes instead of big changes, automatic rollback etc.

> And to me, AI should best be used to add rocket fuel to existing practices

The more your codebase follows best practices and consistent patterns, the better AI will do and the faster you can move.

Same as humans really, just even faster. I'm also excited that people are finally writing docs and without even any flogging! They're calling the docs "skills" but hey whatever works

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

#495

Post by gwerbin »

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

There are untold billions of dollars to be had if you can make this future come to pass. You don't need AGI to make it happen either. You just need to keep making the context windows bigger and keep coming up with updated training data. It's not the outcome I want, but it really does feel within reach. The only limiting factor is going to be token count and cost to process/generate those tokens. But if you don't particularly care about quality, costs are going to have to go up by several orders of magnitude before you start to regret firing your software engineers.

I don't know what happens in a decade when there are no junior engineers, skilled senior engineers are becoming rare, and the only data left the train LLMs on is 200th-generation slop. But AI slop being qualitatively slop is not enough of a obstacle to prevent that future from coming to pass. And billions of dollars will be "saved" along the way.

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

#497

Post by YZF »

mittensc wrote: post #460
vividfrier wrote: post #440

[flagged]

I'm seeing the exact opposite on a large C++ project. I have friends at other companies with similar projects, they say the same thing. It's like we're living in different worlds. Still, LLMs are nice for well defined small projects, microservices, tools and research.

What tools have you tried? Are we talking Codex GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.7?

Would you say the project is well architected? Clear boundaries? Or ball of mud?

How large is large?

Are there AGENT.md files giving good information that helps LLMs get context when looking at a certain area of the code?

Is it all in one repo? multiple repos?

Are there good tests?

I feel like these are some of the many variables that can make a difference.

I work on a pretty large project/code base, written mostly in Go, and I have pretty positive experience with LLMs. I take on fairly small chunks, I review and understand the changes. I also use LLMs to explore options and prototype quickly. They're also very good at fixing bugs, failing tests etc.

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

#498

Post by tracerbulletx »

techblueberry wrote: post #448
vividfrier wrote: post #440

[flagged]

To me the big thing I see in blog posts is this implication that “all software engineering best practices are out the window” And to me, AI should best be used to add rocket fuel to existing practices. Better tests, better observability, more atomic changes instead of big changes, automatic rollback etc.

It does change previously assumed cost benefit trade offs and you should at least question any previously held beliefs.

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

#500

Post by LPisGood »

locknitpicker wrote: post #454
techblueberry wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me the big thing I see in blog posts is this implication that “all software engineering best practices are out the window” And to me, AI should best be used to add rocket fuel to existing practices. Better tests, better observability, more atomic changes instead of big changes, automatic rollback etc.

> To me the big thing I see in blog posts is this implication that “all software engineering best practices are out the window” Yes, this is indeed a pungent smell. AI code assistants allow whole projects to be refactored and even rewritten in entirely different programming languages and software stacks in a few minutes, sometimes even with one-shot prompts. Most assistants even support creating and maintaining test…

I’ve seen AI write a lot of buggy code. I’ve rarely seen AI wrote test cases that expose buggy code.
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