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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

#511

Post by cstrahan »

Aerroon wrote: post #445
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…

> but if you just prompt the AI and believe what it tell you then you have AI psychosis. No it isn't. Do you believe what teachers told you in school? Yes? Well, I guess you're suffering from just normal psychosis! I don't understand how people don't understand that people offer unreliable information too. We learned about the tongue map in school as kids - many kids still learn that in school today. It's still BS re…

> Do you believe what teachers told you in school? Yes?

Nope. At least, not without proof. That would, IMO, be kinda crazy. We could argue semantics - maybe “stupid” would be a better word? Lacking in critical thinking skills? Whatever “it” is, it isn’t good.

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

#512

Post by nurettin »

sph wrote: post #444
vividfrier wrote: post #440

[flagged]

[flagged]

There are more points of view than that on HN.

A common one: "I have stopped writing code, the world is going to end"

Another: "I will code by hand, I don't care"

Another: "I use it as a tool, but the hype bothers me so much that I have to bitch and moan from morning to night"

This one is: "I have stopped writing code, it wasn't the end of the world."

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

#513

Post by zubspace »

redwood wrote: post #344
perching_aix wrote: post #82

I'm going through a mixed experience regarding this, personally. Management is really pushing AI. It's obnoxious, and their idea on how it fits into my team's job specifically is completely, hilariously detached from reality. On the off chance someone says something reasonable, unless it fits the mold, it's immediately discarded. The mold being "spec driven development". We're not even a product team for crying out l…

What's the matter with spec driven development? It probably carries derisk IP benefits

This will be pushed down from people, who will have no deep understanding of it. But it does check some boxes in an ISO certification.

Well, now you must to work with a confusing tool which slows you down. You are not allowed to use claude directly anymore, because someone heard that mythos is really bad for security. But hey, the tool integrates well with Jira!

You hate every second working with this thing. All the joy you had with explorative coding is forever gone, which was the sole reason you entered this field.

Deep inside you know that you can't change your job, because every other employer will cut its workforce as AI removes all manual labor of a software engineer and reduces risk to a minimum.

Oh, now we can finally move all those jobs to india without risk and shareholders will love it! How awesome is that! Wait, do we still need that guy in cubicle 42, who bitches and moans about AI every day? Nah...

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

#514

Post by suprfnk »

zarzavat wrote: post #455
vividfrier wrote: post #440

[flagged]

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…

> to start with a blank canvas and create something that others will value

AI is much faster at taking an idea and creating a working proof of concept than any human I've seen.

Not saying it's good engineering, but leave that to the gardeners.

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

#515

Post by trizoza »

You're speaking of my company and I'm forever grateful.

I'm afraid to say this out loud internally because I'm afraid of the next round of layoffs and I want to keep my job. So I just keep on shipping at a high pace, building massive cognitive debt and hoping the agents will get so good in near future, that there won't be the need for understanding the codebase.

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

#516

Post by mittensc »

YZF wrote: post #497
mittensc wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 di…

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

Yes, with generous budgets.

> They're also very good at fixing bugs,

Seeing opposite here too, they are like eager juniors 'oh the issue is here and here's a 5 page report why', and it's wrong... then you add more info and it goes to a different spot... repeat until you get tired and solve it yourseld, it is useful as a rubber ducky i guess.

> 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.

Great that it's working for you, I'm just pointing out there's a massive disconnect.

I would assume your work can be done by a junior engineer without any prior knowledge (except LLM md files) with same quality but less speed?

If yes, then great, perhaps that's where the disconnect is, complexity.

Also, if yes, which would be cheaper?, junior engineer or LLM?

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

#518

Post by fuzzy2 »

vividfrier wrote: post #440

[flagged]

> I feel like I'm in a different field compared to the rest of hacker news.

That should be my line. My new employer does not use LLMs at all. Software development, marketing, hardware development, nothing. Maybe too little, but whatever.

The problems the company is facing are entirely unrelated to "throughput".

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

#519

Post by pbasista »

vividfrier wrote: post #440

[flagged]

> And I haven't written a single line of code myself since what - February maybe?

Have you measured the impact of that on your ability to create good code? From my experience, relying on AI tends to degrade that ability.

Also, you seem to be able to do all of what you say and benefit from AI tools because you seem to understand the overall bigger picture well enough to be able to drive the AI agents to do their work properly. In other words, you operate in a familiar territory where you do not need to learn much new things.

But what about the junior people with little experience? Will they be able to manage such AI workflow? And more importantly, if junior people are given such AI tools, how will they learn?

These are all questions which may not matter in the short term and one might ignore them if they just want to see the profits and efficiency gains during the next cycle. But what about the long term?

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

#520

Post by designerarvid »

pbasista wrote: post #519
vividfrier wrote: post #440

[flagged]

> And I haven't written a single line of code myself since what - February maybe? Have you measured the impact of that on your ability to create good code? From my experience, relying on AI tends to degrade that ability. Also, you seem to be able to do all of what you say and benefit from AI tools because you seem to understand the overall bigger picture well enough to be able to drive the AI agents to do their work…

How good are you at writing assembly? What about junior people that take an introductory course in assembly but never practice it.

Maybe I’m pushing it a bit, I know, but a couple of decades ago you could’ve been asking this instead.

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