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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

#881

Post by johnnyanmac »

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 feel like many in the anti camp have their own kind of reactionary psychosis.

You're using psychosis wrong. My literal reality is my entire industry trying to use Ai as an excuse to payoff hundreds of thousands, to millions of American engineers in lieu of outsourcing work overseas. It's having hostile promots to use AI that never truly go away (if you're even given an option to turn off the prompt). It's seeing an emerging generation completely stunted because AI's best use is to cheat the education system and ruin the youth's critical thinking. It's looking in apallment at proposals for data centers that take more energy than the state actually has.

And while you can try to call these exaggerations, you're falling into the very psychosis of this article if you want to deny this reality as a whole. "but the tech is making us so productive" is not a valid justification to literally collapse human society as we know it.

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

#882

Post by viccis »

Brystephor wrote: post #712
ex-aws-dude wrote: post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s funny I’ve been doing that too Trying to crank out all the tools I never had time to build because I think we’re going to get cut off eventually

Same. I've used it for debugging failed canary tests which required scripts and very specific knowledge on the canary platform that I wouldnt of ever spent time on. I also have scripts to fetch specific database assets and forward them to slack channels so I can easily share them with a group rather than manually running a query and generating them. I had a theory about improving a product. I asked it to build an off…

I find it very useful for debugging tasks like that but it always ends up costing me like $3 despite doing incredible work. And then one of the other engineers at my company will rack up like $200 in tokens in one day producing tens of thousands of SLOC and we end up actually shipping about the same stuff. Sometimes I wonder if it's bad agent use discipline (just pointing it at massive codebases and having it read it all from scratch each time) and sometimes I wonder if they're just using it for personal projects. Because none of that code seems to land in prod, and I've found that cranking out 10s of thousands of SLOCs at a time is a recipe for a mess.

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

#883

Post by caarmen »

hosteur wrote: post #709
ex-aws-dude wrote: post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s funny I’ve been doing that too Trying to crank out all the tools I never had time to build because I think we’re going to get cut off eventually

May I ask what tools did you make so far? And what is on your roadmap?

Not OP, but a very simple example: I use AI to review my work before opening a PR for my colleagues to review. I ask it to review the commits in my branch. Instead of consuming tokens just to instruct it how to use git operations and other tools to find the commits since the base commit, I asked AI to create a little bash script to make patch files commit1.patch, commit2.patch, commit3.patch, etc, for all the commits in my branch since the base commit. Now I just use this script to prepare the context of commits to review.

I feel like an imposter here, I’m definitely not using AI as much as it seems everyone is :( I can’t imagine using hundreds of dollars of tokens a day. But maybe this little tip for reviews might be helpful to someone.

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

#884

Post by johnnyanmac »

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.…

>If you have a good codebase with proper rails, hygiene and architecture

Okay, so Ai is completely useless in my industry. Got it.

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

#885

Post by Drupon »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #591
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…

Also at a FAANG here. Surprised you don't manage to use $300 in a whole day. It's almost trivial to productively use that much in under an hour. Leadership is not being dumb, at least on this topic. If your token usage is that low, you just aren't using AI that much (even if you think you are.)

[flagged]

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

#886

Post by viccis »

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.

This is a very common pattern with AI psychosis victims (and with crypto and NFT evangelists before). Comments whose haughtiness is matched only by their lack of content.

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

#887

Post by rogermarley »

I think one factor is AI is encouraging people to turn off their brains.

It sometimes feels like AI chatbot use is like the doomscrolling of work - it's always easier just to dump something into the chatbot than think about it.

The real question is: what's the fallout going to be after the dust settles? My guess is that the explosion of codebase entropy now underway from this is going to make for an interesting future - once it reaches the point where AI agents are spinning constantly despite progress grinding to a halt.

And they're be no veterans who know the codebase deeply to step in and fix things because it was all vibecoded - and then what are companies going to do?

I think that's the point where they turn back to the thinkers for help.

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

#888

Post by viccis »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #881
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 feel like many in the anti camp have their own kind of reactionary psychosis. You're using psychosis wrong. My literal reality is my entire industry trying to use Ai as an excuse to payoff hundreds of thousands, to millions of American engineers in lieu of outsourcing work overseas. It's having hostile promots to use AI that never truly go away (if you're even given an option to turn off the prompt). It's seeing…

>You're using psychosis wrong

Also "reactionary" haha

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

#889

Post by deadbabe »

fjdjshsh wrote: post #650

I find talking about X psychosis (or generally using mental illness metaphors) unproductive. It sets up the conversation to be "nothing else to do with this person". Maybe the problem is you, but you won't figure that out if you think the other person has psychosis. For example, maybe you need to do a better job explaining, changing your language, simplifying things, being more concrete with consequences. Or maybe yo…

How about AI Derangement Syndrome?

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

#890

Post by johnnyanmac »

ramoz wrote: post #234
yumraj wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't help him. Let him figure it out by himself, else they (he and hospital) will never learn.

I don't have time for that. I just told him he needs to hire somebody

I was going to say to open yourself up as a contractor and scape some of the money off top. But it sounds like you dint need that opportunity.

That sadly does seem to be the trajectory of 5-10 years from now, though. I can't speak to if "AI is the future" of 30+ years from now, but these coming years sounds rife for "janitors" to clean up all the slop being produced by newly empowered idea guys

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