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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

#581

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.

It's due to the jagged edge of AI experience. Because it's not deterministic the results don't play out deterministically (e.g. similar scenarios will have different and potentially drastically different results)

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

#582
post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe this is what will turn software engineering into an Engineering field. Oh man, I think you may have touched the third rail here. My first job out of high school was as an AutoCAD/network admin at a large Civil & Structural firm. I later got further into tech, but after my initial experience with real Engineering, "software engineering" always made my eyes roll. Without real enforced standards, without consequ…

This is actually not a bad exam to administer: https://ncees.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/FINAL_PE-Electr...

In the Civil & Structural world, there is no greater honor than to be on the standards committee.

I hope that this becomes a thing in Software Engineering.

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

#585

Mitchellh is on to something. Some of the AI products I've seen seem like psychosis hallucinatory fever dreams, using terms and concepts that have no meaning. Funding? $50,000,000 pre-seed.

When I note some strange money flow I just assume embazzlement or money laundering.

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

#586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how different this is from having companies let Fortune or Inc magazine do their thinking for them. Or random consultants. Is "AI said it was a good idea" and worse than "we were following industry trends"?

> Is "AI said it was a good idea" and worse than "we were following industry trends"? Based on the stuff I've seen, yes it seems a lot worse.

Though there is some overlap in software development. Like for example using heavy-weight dependencies, that try to follow the one size fits all approach, when one could use a much simpler, faster or even no dependency at all. The LLMs will readily suggest quickly adding that huge dependency, that is mentioned in beginner tutorials. Or suggest to use regex for parsing HTML.

(Real example, had this from Kimi 2.6 recently, lol.)

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

#587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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

#588
post #583
post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Or he's just giving a sane take, one that most people in the Bay Area have by now.

Lots of tech companies are doing just fine with purely AI written code at this point.

Saying that the quality is getting worse in some immeasurable way (while incidents remain the same) is literally unfalsifiable.

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

#589

What is described in the tweet may be worrying or not but it does not describe anything close to psychotic behavior.

> "In psychopathology, psychosis is the inability to distinguish what is or is not real. Examples of psychotic symptoms are delusions, hallucinations, and disorganized or incoherent thoughts or speech."

I think the use of the word here is meant to invoke the vision of someone under heavy delusions or hallucinations, such as (what Hashimoto percieves as) the delusion that shipping more bugs is fine if AI can resolve them faster. To what extent this counts as delusion (and thereby psychosis) would depend on how deeply you believe that this and related opinions are wrong.

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

#590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve had to do a ton of SQL stuff lately, which I haven’t really worked with since the late 90s. ChatGPT has been a godsend, not just for me, but for our only coworker who knows SQL well, whom I’d probably be bugging several times a day at my wits’ end. But no one cares about those kinds of productivity gains. Just the ones that will completely replace us.

I'm always amazed by those comments. Why couldn't you buy a book on SQL[0], and spend a week on it? Or just go over to YouTube for a refresher? [0]: Like https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/sql-queries-for/9780134...

Extremely weird take.
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