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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

#541

Post by user34283 »

kilroy123 wrote: post #184
fooker wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might not pan out to be the glorious victory of human craft as you’re imagining it to be. Here’s a slightly different future - these AI rescue consultants are bots too, just trained for this purpose. Plausible? I have already experienced claude 4.7 handle pretty complex refactors without issues. Scale and correctness aren’t even 1% of the issue it was last year. You just have to get the high level design right,…

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

With GPT 5.4 or 5.5 I did not notice degradation in performance when it was working on a large 5k line file containing a WebView, JS scripts, as well as native UI.

I instructed it to split it up anyway, yet I wonder how often the concerns around the mess are imaginative rather than practical.

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

#542

Post by anal_reactor »

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…

When I read the discussions about AI making code worse I keep bringing the same argument: people made bad code even before AI. Average coder is barely functioning and that's a fact.

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

#543

Post by stefanlindbohm »

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.

This would only be somewhat equivalent if you compiled your code into assembly and committed that output to the repo, and then had to continue development within the assembly codebase using the same method.

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

#544

Post by thinkingemote »

Up to 80% of software projects fail. Most startups will fail. VC's and bankers know this.

Does using AI increase or lower that failure rate?

Does seeing a project that uses AI fail mean it wasn't going to fail if it didn't use AI?

To try to answer it with my gut: I imagine that we could see more projects failing, but the percentage that fail would be the same. Most projects that use AI will fail because most projects generally will fail, but the time and cost to get a successful project will lower.

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

#545

Post by mike_hock »

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…

If you think you can let AI write code without double checking you have AI psychosis.

If you prefer reviewing AI-written code over writing it yourself, you just have odd preferences from my perspective (but not psychosis).

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

#546

Post by bob1029 »

The longer I look at the AI transformation, the more it seems like a people problem than a technology problem. The technology is undeniably there. The people are all over the place.

I am watching a 10 person company try to run 3 different AI initiatives in parallel. Everyone wants to be "the guy" on this one. I cannot imagine there will ever be a bigger opportunity to ego trip as a technology person. This is it. This is the last call before it's all over. There are many businesses out there that are beyond traumatized by human developers taking them on bad rides. The microsecond they think this stuff will work they are going to fire everyone.

The psychosis comes from the tension here. We effectively have The Empire vs the rebel alliance now. I know how the movies go, but in real life I think I'd rather be working on the Death Star than anywhere else.

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

#547

Post by frb »

vividfrier wrote: post #440

[flagged]

I feel the same and don’t get the extreme AI is inherently evil vs. AI is the best thing ever invented discussions. For me it’s all just emacs vs vi or tabs vs spaces kind of discussions.

It’s a tool and the good old sh* in sh* out principle applies.

People might take Mitchell’s comment as some kind of anti-AI stance, but it’s not he uses it regularly and makes a point in the X comments: “use AI, but think”

That comment sums it up best, because right now it’s hard to talk to either side, which separates at the comma.

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

#548

Post by alanfranz »

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?

This is a false equivalence.

A compiler is a predictable, testable, deterministic piece of software.

An LLM is not.

Sure, all abstractions leak; so, at some point in time, for some reason, you may need to check its compiled code ( cough cough gcc 2.96 ). But, if today your code compiles properly, it will properly compile tomorrow as well.

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

#549

Post by onjectic »

mitjam wrote: post #89
Utkarsh_Mood wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

share the prompt!

For a start, invert - ask about the exact opposite in a separate session.

I’ll second this. Great way to recalibrate yourself, once you see it confidently assert the exact opposite statement.

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

#550

Post by brabel »

practice9 wrote: post #504
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 writ…

I am convinced human reviews are overhyped in the industry. We've done it in my company since we started it, and bugs keep happening. People are just terrible at spotting them in the middle of 100 lines of correct code.

Machines, OTOH, are very good at it. I am currently trying to make the code review experience better for humans by not just having the AI review the code, but interact with the human, pointing out potential problems, bad patterns, perhaps hiding some code (e.g. renamings, formatting changes).

Developers still want to review the code, despite provably being bad at spotting bugs, because they want to actually keep knowledge of what's being modified in the code base, so I think this is the best approach.

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