I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis • Hacker News Board

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

#531

Post by hypfer » Sat, May 16, 2026, 7:12 AM UTC

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…

> 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 suites with first-class support. Whatever you prompt, they do it.

> And here we are, expected to believe that these tools can't or don't follow best practices?

Uh they don't really. The contradiction you're seeing is actually fictional because that premise is wrong.

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

#532

Post by cyclopeanutopia » Sat, May 16, 2026, 7:18 AM UTC

nkapias wrote: post #503

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.

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.

Or just when one person sees "great result", the other sees "garbage".

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

#533

Post by Nautman » Sat, May 16, 2026, 7:18 AM UTC

designerarvid wrote: post #520

pbasista wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I understand what you mean, but in my opinion there's a big difference between writing in natural language and actively engaging your brain with writing code, looking up documentation, etc.

It also sort of feels like "you don't know what you don't know", i.e. would you have considered an alternative better solution if you thought about it yourself, went to the documentation, found a tutorial on the web?

Of course, production is arguably a lot faster but it feels like there's starting to become a trade-off where the models feel so capable that we stop trying to find the solution to the problem ourselves and thus perhaps degrading our personal reasoning capabilities. I say this as something I'm afraid is happening, not something I'm certain of.

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

#534

Post by bornfreddy » Sat, May 16, 2026, 7:20 AM UTC

Swizec wrote: post #494

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.

> 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

My main grief with AI-generated docs is that they (unless the instructions were very clear on this) by default describe the path to the current code and how it is an improvement over what was before, instead of just explaining its purpose. I see this all the time when reviewing other people's code... Fortunately it is easy to add a generic instruction to project-wide CLAUDE.md to avoid this problem, but it would be nice if this skill came out of the box.

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

#535

Post by cyclopeanutopia » Sat, May 16, 2026, 7:20 AM UTC

user34283 wrote: post #524

vividfrier wrote: post #440

[flagged]

Microservices in big companies where you have to first write the spec and then fully understand the changes is maybe among the least benefiting use cases yet. When you work on just a new mobile app, this is where I find AI is making the biggest difference. On mobile you don't need specs and you don't need to understand every detail of the implementation. You can QA test the app on a real device. It gives me more conf…

What do you consider a "major feature" in this comment?

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

#536

Post by pbasista » Sat, May 16, 2026, 7:22 AM UTC

designerarvid wrote: post #520

pbasista wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> How good are you at writing assembly?

How is that relevant to the topic of this discussion?

Compilation from higher order languages to the machine code is deterministic. It is sufficient to review and well-test the tool which does the translation. Given the same input, the output will always be the same.

Transformation of a natural language prompt to code by an AI tool is non-deterministic. The outputs will vary between runs. Therefore, it is always necessary to verify them.

That is the difference.

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

#537

Post by user34283 » Sat, May 16, 2026, 7:26 AM UTC

cyclopeanutopia wrote: post #535

user34283 wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microservices in big companies where you have to first write the spec and then fully understand the changes is maybe among the least benefiting use cases yet. When you work on just a new mobile app, this is where I find AI is making the biggest difference. On mobile you don't need specs and you don't need to understand every detail of the implementation. You can QA test the app on a real device. It gives me more conf…

What do you consider a "major feature" in this comment?

Let's say iCloud sync

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

#538

Post by wrxd » Sat, May 16, 2026, 7:30 AM UTC

I’m at a FAANG and we have $300/day token quota. Personally I don’t use that much of it but management is pushing really hard for it. “the quota has been raised for a reason, use it”. Any task: “have you tried working on it with Claude?”. Every meeting “now engineer x and y will show you what he did with AI”.

It’s not all useless but most of the days I think I would be more productive if some processes were streamlined rather than if I had to throw tokens at them and still fail.

Of all the showcases I’ve seen the best are the ones written by people assuming that the token bonanza will not last so they used AI to build tools they wished they had. AI used to build the tool but by no means used by the tool, so if/when token quota gets reduced we still have a functional tool.

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

#539

Post by perlgeek » Sat, May 16, 2026, 7:31 AM UTC

spacechild1 wrote: post #249

Barrin92 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, I was never so happy to work in Germany. People used to joke about the proverbial fax machine still being a thing but I've never been so glad to work in a culture where this mania doesn't exist. Reading HN is like entering Alice's Wonderland of token maxxers and AI psychotics. Genuinely don't know a single person here who is forced to work like this.

Actually, I have been wondering to which extend the AI craze has reached the DACH region. I don't work for any company and neither do my friends. HN is essentially my only peephole into the world of commercial software development and I'm aware that it's extremely biased towards Big Tech and SV startup culture.

I can give you a single data point from Germany.

I work at a hosting provider that has pretty conservative customers who don't want to host on AWS/Azure due to data privacy / safety concerns, among other things.

For us, sending customer data to the US is a big no-go.

We have been experimenting with LLM usage, first through a Gemini subscription, then also with the Claude API. Participation has been lightly encouraged by management. As for coding, we haven't let the LLMs loose on our core components, but tooling on the fringes (like deployment scripts, reporting) has seen some uptick in LLM usage.

We have also started building an on-premise inference cluster, which is in alpha testing, and where the "don't include customer data" restriction doesn't apply anymore.

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

#540

Post by perlgeek » Sat, May 16, 2026, 7:33 AM UTC

jampa wrote: post #387

Groxx wrote: post #24

Bug reports also go down when people lose faith that they will be fixed, because reporting them is often a substantial time commitment. You see it happen pretty regularly as trust in a group/company collapses.

The last three times I filed detailed bug reports as a client, all I got back were AI replies asking the same questions I’d already answered in the original report and suggesting alternatives I’d explicitly said I’d already tried. No wonder people don’t write bug reports anymore.

TBF I've had that experience before AI.

I think it was just text templates being used by some support staff.