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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

#871

Post by verdverm »

look_lookatme wrote: post #831
denkmoon wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use $30 a day to produce a decent amount of code. Certainly more than we need - thinking about/designing the correct solution/distilling requirements is still the bottleneck. How can you possibly even review $300/day worth of output?

If you build your own reviewer layer/tool it will burn a ton of tokens. Millions of tokens of input.

You, review bots and first pass bots can chew through tokens. Also if you haven't put effort into your harnesses, the agent will have to spend more time and tokens figuring things out again and again

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

#872

Post by heartbreak »

xyzal wrote: post #562
foxfired wrote: post #260

Maybe this is what will turn software engineering into an Engineering field. Right know, prompters are setting up whole company infrastructure. I personally know one. He migrated the companies database to a newer Postgres version. He was successful in the end, but I was gnawing my teeth when he described every step of the process. It sounded like "And then, I poured gasoline on the servers while smoking a cigarette.…

I work at software in a medical setting. We are piloting an integration with a startup for measuring [some bodily variable relevant in ICU setting]. They are obviously vibecoding (docs are telling) and their API is failing in unexpected ways that they are not able to resolve. I am just waiting when this are going to harm somebody.

Don’t worry, some medical professionals are also delegating their thinking to LLMs. No need for the software middleman to cause harm.

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

#873

Post by IX-103 »

doginasuit wrote: post #355
charlotte-fyi wrote: post #248

I feel in a really weird position where I both really dislike what AI is doing to the experience and practice of writing code, to the point where I want a job doing literally anything else besides using the computer, but also think that these tools are extremely powerful and only getting better. I think Mitchell's point is well taken -- it's possible for these tools to introduce rotten foundations that will only be f…

I've never had more fun coding, but the key is actually still writing the code yourself. The LLM has terrible judgment but an encyclopedic knowledge and the ability to pick out important details in a sea of information. Their worse use is producing code, but somehow that gets all the energy. Being an LLM babysitter is energy draining and you feel less and less in control. No job is worth being miserable doing somethi…

In my experience, its the opposite. The AI is very good at writing code, but it is unreliable at any kind of design. I use it as a fancy form of autocomplete. I give the broad strokes: "add a method here and change all but this one caller to use the new method", "Apply this design pattern here for this change but don't do this other thing". It completes the task reasonably well and sometimes even remembers to run the code formatter and check that tests pass.

If I ask it to me produce a design, I'll almost always end up with something unworkable or inefficient.

Though if you push it hard enough then it can sometimes give you a good description of what existing code does and how it does it (which can be easily verified).

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

#874

Post by est31 »

zomglings wrote: post #723
denkmoon wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use $30 a day to produce a decent amount of code. Certainly more than we need - thinking about/designing the correct solution/distilling requirements is still the bottleneck. How can you possibly even review $300/day worth of output?

It doesn’t have to be $300/day worth of output tokens. It could be like $290/day worth of input tokens to teach both you and the model about the problem you are solving and then $10/day worth of output tokens.

If you give it $290 of input tokens for $10 of output tokens, you are doing something wrong. I.e. you paste the whole CI output into the prompt instead of giving it a link to the file, and then the AI greps its way through it (using a fraction of the tokens).

Sometimes AI overdoes things and it re-runs the whole testsuite because the tail command didn't have enough lines, but the other way round messes up the context so much so that in the end all that context is useless.

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

#875

Post by johnnyanmac »

nfRfqX5n wrote: post #616
wrxd wrote: post #538

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 streamlin…

Seems like people are spending more time building tools than doing actual work. Lots of overlap too

In all fairness, doing actual work in this current slice of time is not what componies are prioritizing as of now.

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

#876

Post by nazcan »

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…

Totally agree with one shotting GUI tools. I especially have liked it to create a single-file web app, and then open it with Chromium locally (no web server needed).

In my case, it built a tool for splitting sounds and a tool for defining hitboxes for a game. Tools made exactly for more workflow. Wild times.

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

#877

Post by DoctorOetker »

zzrrt wrote: post #432
charlotte-fyi wrote: post #248

I feel in a really weird position where I both really dislike what AI is doing to the experience and practice of writing code, to the point where I want a job doing literally anything else besides using the computer, but also think that these tools are extremely powerful and only getting better. I think Mitchell's point is well taken -- it's possible for these tools to introduce rotten foundations that will only be f…

> But humans have introduced subtle yet catastrophic bugs into code forever So now the AIs will do more of that, at superhuman speed. > will we also not learn that we need to shift more to specification and validation We'll just quickly learn what we've been trying to do for decades, while also treading water in floods of more code than has ever been written before? And some of the motivations to write correct code a…

I think the commenter was referring to formal verification with "specification and validation": have the LLM emit formal proofs about invariants etc.

Currently the bugs are found by people using LLM's but aren't the developers. As more projects start getting access to compute, they can run those LLM searches for bugs themselves, and can simply prevent shipping the bugs.

I'm surprised no one has tried making any statistical analysis of bug densities, and "bug authors" in an attempt to identify untrustworthy developers, regardless of intent. Given a dataset of authors and prior bugs, it may help find more bugs by tracking their pull requests with higher scrutiny...

Some people may end up with an eternal stain if they've been taking money to submit vulnerable code to code bases...

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

#878

Post by chezelenkoooo »

mancerayder wrote: post #728
wrxd wrote: post #538

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 streamlin…

300 a day?? 7K dollars a month? No wonder they need to lay people off!

Yes, the cost of AI is a big contributing factor.

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

#879

Post by mrits »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #707
Sharlin wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you even realize how insane your comment is? "If you aren't donating at least your salary's worth of company money to another company every day, are you even working?"

Used to think exactly like you. That's why I know you all will "get it" eventually. Most companies and orgs are just so far behind the curve.

You might want to put this statement in your AI and ask if it was logically sound

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

#880

Post by all2 »

epolanski wrote: post #722
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…

> In my experience, AI really lowered the bar for bad code in the name of delivering faster. I would've believed that 6 months ago, but not now. If you have a good codebase with proper rails, hygiene and architecture, AI will produce better code than most engineers out there. People forget that 90% of the field has always been charlatans barely able to implement a fizz buzz or go much beyond trial and error googling.…

I'm hand rolling a project right now because even frontier models I use bloat things beyond comprehension. Because I'm intimately familiar with the domain, I know the shape of things, how the data should flow, and so on, and if l even if I spec it clearly AI will write 2x to 5x the amount of code necessary to make something work.
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