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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

#501

Post by techblueberry »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #498
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.

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

There’s a chance that it doesn’t change previously assumed cost benefit, or at least not in the aggregate. There has always been more code than could be safely integrated.

I don’t think AI actually changes that we should always be questioning everything, including how much we question at a time.

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

#502

Post by zarzavat »

jgraettinger1 wrote: post #465
zarzavat wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some programmers are gardeners. It sounds like you're one too. Your job is to maintain a large existing codebase. You probably didn't understand the entire codebase before AI, nobody did, so it doesn't matter that you don't understand it now. AI is very good at gardening, nobody doubts that. Other programmers are painters. Their job is to start with a blank canvas and create something that others will value. When AI…

The right metaphor isn't painting, though, it's molding clay. That first pass is slop, but it's raw clay that the agent is very good at molding given a modicum of direction and "not this, do that" comments. The combined first-pass and reshaping time is still far less than writing by hand from scratch. And increasingly, that first pass is ... not bad?

Not all code is fixable. Sometimes the best thing to do with code is to throw it away.

Without any human code to grab on to, AI has a habit of writing code that is pervasively low quality and rife with misunderstandings such that it always needs to be thrown out.

And yes with considerable prompting effort you can improve this picture. But it's easier, faster and cheaper to just write the code yourself. Code is the best specification language we have.

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

#503

Post by nkapias »

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.

Noticed different results from friends, we have similar projects and tools.

We're guessing it comes from organizational behavior (culture, governance, management, etc.), we work in diverse teams / regions / companies.

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

#504

Post by practice9 »

vividfrier wrote: post #440

[flagged]

It's because HN is in AI meta-psychosis :)

Our experience is very similar except we didn't really have a review process before, and now LLMs find bugs before PRs get merged in main.

We had 5x-100x speedups in some legacy but important pipelines, with no regressions (validated after extensively by humans). It's not that the code was actively bad. It's just only 1-5% people in the local SWE market would be able to write code that runs so fast and efficient and benchmark it correctly.

We found a subtle correctness bug that was in production for half of the decade (both GPT-5 and Claude Opus were able to find it), confirmed by human after.

And we keep finding subtle bugs that have been introduced by humans before (despite the human reviews, the particular domain is just difficult no matter how many docs and comments and tests one writes)

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

#505

Post by chillfox »

rjbwork wrote: post #317
Aurornis wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Several people I know have already gone through phases like this. When you're doing it alone there is a moderating factor when their friends and family start calling them out on their behavior or weird things they say. I can't imagine how bad it would be if your employer started doing this from the leadership. You'd be pressured to get on board or fear getting fired. Nobody would be trying to moderate your thinking e…

I have a friend that is a junior in a security-oriented sys-admin/network engineer type role. They have been doing the job for only a bit over a year. No background in programming. Their entire organization has been handed Codex/Claude and told to "go all in on AI" and "automate everything". So the mandate is for people that do not know how to code and have the keys to the castle to unleash these things upon their sy…

From what I have seen, most corporate it security people are at a service desk level at best. They are tool runners who don't really understand what the tools spit out, they just go bug other teams about it.

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

#506

Post by LPisGood »

tns_admin wrote: post #474
shridharxp wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, pointless…

I have a friend, smart guy, who is writing web services and “connecting them together” for a large firm; he has absolutely no programming experience.

Talking to him, he told me he couldn’t even reverse a string. He is at once many times more valuable than ever before to his company, but also far more dangerous than ever before.

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

#507

Post by ben_w »

I was thinking about a different topic that could have the same headline just the other day.

Never mind code, what happens when the CEOs, or the investors, listen to the sycophantic voices of their LLMs?

I think it looks like every product becomes the next Juicero of its field.

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

#508

Post by jcgrillo »

cstrahan wrote: post #466
sph wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

That seems like an odd way to interpret what they wrote. Imagine old school machinists saying to a CNC machinist “Ha! See, maybe you don’t jog the axes manually, but you still have to be involved in placing the stock material, and you have to do the CAD/CAM work - so did it really machine the part for you? No!” AI is a tool like any other. It has its limitations. It has classes of problems that it is suited to handle…

I'm sorry but both of these are false equivalences. CNC isn't about making general machining operations faster or necessarily better. It's about making a single machine more versatile. Instead of needing an assembly line of machines you can get a bunch of different operations done on the same part without moving it to a different machine. You can also do compound operations that were otherwise highly specialized (like milling a turbocharger's radial compressor wheel). You can get the same job done with a series of manual operations though.

A garden hose vs a bucket is also the same situation. You can accomplish the same thing with either, but one might be more labor intensive.

AI is nothing like either of those. It would be like instead of a bucket you get a garden hose that points in a different direction every time you try to use it. Or instead of a 5 axis mill that rigorously executes the g-code it just randomly reinterprets tool paths each time it cuts a part. Both of these things would be worse than useless in their respective applications.

AI is different because it plays to the pliability of the software domain. Even fairly shitty, irreproducible results can be good enough for software development, if you don't look at it too closely. Make analogies to the physical world at your peril!

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

#509

Post by csomar »

jayd16 wrote: post #496
vividfrier wrote: post #440

[flagged]

Can you name the company or product? At least that way some of the claims of shipped features and stability can be objectively verified.

It's a two months account hyping AI (look at the comments).

And to answer your question: No. I am yet to see a product made by AI or a product that used to require a dozen engineer and a few years being made by a single engineer in a month. Anything demoed is always a UI/functionality clone of the same thing LLMs regurgitates.

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