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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

#571

Post by autoexec »

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…

There's a huge difference between a teacher giving outdated information representing what was once our (or at least their) best understanding of the world, and a chatbot that just randomly makes up things for no reason while insisting that it's all true.

Also, a good teacher should be encouraging the development of critical thinking skills and correcting your errors, while AI will just tell you how brilliant you are when you wrongly tell it about how you've just invented a new form of math or disproved a scientific theory you barely understand in the first place.

Not all BS is the same, just as not all sources are equally unreliable.

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

#572

Post by zelphirkalt »

elktown wrote: post #106
mitchellh wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. I use AI a ton and I'm having more fun every day than I ever did before thanks to it (on average, highs are higher, lows are lower). Your characterization is all very accurate. Thank you. Here's some other topics I've written on it: - https://mitchellh.com/writing/my-ai-adoption-journey - https://mitchellh.com/writing/building-block-economy - https://mitchellh.com/writing/simdutf-no-libcxx (complex change th…

I thinking that it’s quite a different experience going all Jackson Pollock with AI in your own studio on your own terms, compared to the sorry state of affairs of having 100s of Pollocks throwing paint around wildly within a corp to meet a paint quota.

Can we combine this with the infinite monkey theorem? If we have an infinite number of Pollocks throwing paint at an infinitely large canvas surely they are going to create any piece of art we can imagine...

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

#574

Post by CSSer »

LPisGood wrote: post #506
tns_admin wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is what fascinates me. I have a friend, also a smart guy, who has made it to the point he’s at by being a kind of solutions expert. He’s an IT guy, basically. He’s very technical but has never claimed to be a software engineer. He’s writing software with Claude now. The other day he sent me a screenshot of some other team at his work asking him to shut off something he made that was brutalizing an API of theirs. I asked him if he had ever heard of a 429 or exponential back offs. He said no. How do you meta-prompt for that without knowledge?

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

#575

Post by choeger »

So rewriting gets cheaper and cheaper. New features fall more or less into the same category. Refinement doesn't.

The question is: Will we live in the world of breathless re-implementation, new features every week, rebranding every quarter or will we eventually discover the value of stability, software that does its thing more or less optimally for decades?

Recent examples of things like curl or Firefox are interesting in that regard. Will we end up with a nearly perfect HTTP user agent and stick with it for decades?

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

#576

Post by scrollaway »

armchairhacker wrote: post #559
sph wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The Bun rewrite’s aftermath will provide strong evidence either for or against GP.

That’s like saying “the aftermath of Hiroshima will provide strong evidence either for or against nuclear power scientists”.

It’s irrelevant and unrelated.

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

#579

Post by aprilthird2021 »

vividfrier wrote: post #440

[flagged]

I'm in a big tech company everyone has heard of and we have seen a huge spike in incidents which correlates with how much new code is shipped due to AI. Perhaps it's to AI's credit or our engineers' credit that the spike is relatively 1:1 with the spike in new code.

It's causing problems in all parts of the business and leadership's answer is that we must use AI to make fixing incidents faster and automated rather than assess whether we should be shipping enormous amounts of buggy code every day...

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

#580

Post by ngruhn »

choeger wrote: post #575

So rewriting gets cheaper and cheaper. New features fall more or less into the same category. Refinement doesn't. The question is: Will we live in the world of breathless re-implementation, new features every week, rebranding every quarter or will we eventually discover the value of stability, software that does its thing more or less optimally for decades? Recent examples of things like curl or Firefox are interesti…

Preferring "boring software" over the shiny new thing is common wisdom.

Sounds like we prefer stability for stuff we use but not for stuff we sell.

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