I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by malfist » Fri, May 15, 2026, 10:40 PM UTC

fooker wrote: post #158

zmmmmm wrote: post #113

I think AI rescue consulting is going to be come a significant mode of high value consulting, similar to specialists who come in to try and deal with a security breach or do data recovery. Purely AI written systems will scale to a point of complexity that no human can ever understand and the defect close rate will taper down and the token burn per defect rate scale up and eventually AI changes will cause on average m…

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,…

> You just have to get the high level design right, or explicitly ask it critique your design before building it.

Do you think people are not giving their agents specs and asking for input?

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

#172

Post by malfist » Fri, May 15, 2026, 10:41 PM UTC

orev wrote: post #129

zmmmmm wrote: post #113

I think AI rescue consulting is going to be come a significant mode of high value consulting, similar to specialists who come in to try and deal with a security breach or do data recovery. Purely AI written systems will scale to a point of complexity that no human can ever understand and the defect close rate will taper down and the token burn per defect rate scale up and eventually AI changes will cause on average m…

As the models keep improving, wouldn’t you be able to task a newer AI to “clean up this mess”?

Are they improving? I thought they were just getting more expensive

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

#173

Post by Brian_K_White » Fri, May 15, 2026, 10:41 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #133

Brian_K_White wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of like producing code is becoming more like farming. We didn't create the dna we rely on to produce food and lumber, we just set up the conditions and hope the process produces something we want instead of deleting all the bannannas. Farming is a fine an honorable and valuable function for society, but I have no interest in being a farmer. I build things, I don't plant seeds and pray to the gods and hope t…

Prayers are for weather. Pretty much all farmed plant, animal, and fungus species have been selectively bred or genetically modified. Farmers know what's going to grow.

Farming has merely a lot of study and input into the process, very little actual control and no determinism at all. We know how to improve chances is all. The fact that we breed and "engineer" is like a drop in the bucket.

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

#174

Post by mattbrewsbytes » Fri, May 15, 2026, 10:42 PM UTC

The race to invent variants of Gas Towns, Ralph loops, pump out videos, blogs, etc. showing off greenfield development with cleverly named agents running in parallel is another case of engineering people diving head first into Resume Driven Development.

Sure there are industry changing things going on. What if you're working on an app thats a decade old and has had different teams of people, styles, frameworks (thanks to the JS-framework-a-week Resume Driven Development)? Some markdown docs and a loop of agents isn't going to help when humans have trouble understanding what the app does.

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

#175

Post by tosti » Fri, May 15, 2026, 10:42 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #170

jeremyjh wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What concerns me about this is that as these stories multiply and circulate people will just completely stop buying software/SAAS from startups, because 90% or more will be this same thing. It will completely kill the market.

Oracle have routinely had multimillion pound contract failures and people keep buying from them. Big vendors are too big to fail.

Same with Deloitte

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

#176

Post by daneel_w » Fri, May 15, 2026, 10:43 PM UTC

I work for a small telecom services provider whose current VP immediately set an AI course when stepping on board 6 months ago. Involving AI in everything and every task is now our first priority - across all employee segments, not just us system developers - and leadership is embarking on a program to measure employees' AI usage levels as a means to gauge everyone's individual efficiency. It's like the era of the evangelic crypto bros all over again.

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

#177

Post by jiggawatts » Fri, May 15, 2026, 10:43 PM UTC

zmmmmm wrote: post #113

I think AI rescue consulting is going to be come a significant mode of high value consulting, similar to specialists who come in to try and deal with a security breach or do data recovery. Purely AI written systems will scale to a point of complexity that no human can ever understand and the defect close rate will taper down and the token burn per defect rate scale up and eventually AI changes will cause on average m…

> I think AI rescue consulting is going to be come a significant mode of high value consulting

I thought the same when I saw development outsourced to Indians that struggled to write a for loop.

I was wrong.

It turns out that customers will keep doubling down on mistakes until they’re out of funds, and then they’ll hire the cheapest consultants they can find to fix the mess with whatever spare change they can find under the couch cushions.

Source: being called in with a one week time budget to fix a mess built up over years and millions of dollars.

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

#178

Post by alhazrod » Fri, May 15, 2026, 10:43 PM UTC

zmmmmm wrote: post #113

I think AI rescue consulting is going to be come a significant mode of high value consulting, similar to specialists who come in to try and deal with a security breach or do data recovery. Purely AI written systems will scale to a point of complexity that no human can ever understand and the defect close rate will taper down and the token burn per defect rate scale up and eventually AI changes will cause on average m…

The complexity you would come to the rescue to solve, would that be from AI or from the style of programming you let the AI have? I mean, you have very different problems if you use functional style vs object-oriented. It is up to the programmer to realize they want a functional style and request that from the AI, as much as possible. Even AI cannot imagine every state transition, unless it is so smart that it should be the one telling you what to do.

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

#179

Post by bigstrat2003 » Fri, May 15, 2026, 10:43 PM UTC

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…

I agree with you, except it isn't even good at writing code. Almost every time that you get an LLM to write a bunch of code for you, it has mistakes in it. The logic isn't right, the API calls aren't right, the syntax isn't right (!). That problem hasn't yet been fixed and it looks as though it never will be. That means that every line of code it generates, you have to review, because even if 95% of the code is correct, you need to find the 5% which isn't. But if you have to do that, it becomes slower than just writing the code yourself. As people have pointed out over and over again: typing in the code was never the part that took time. So I don't agree that LLMs are really useful for writing code.

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

#180

Post by thaumasiotes » Fri, May 15, 2026, 10:44 PM UTC

blipvert wrote: post #147

singlow wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However Michael Crichton imagined it would.

I guess that “well” wouldn’t have sold many books.

That depends. If this equipment is part of the plot, you're right. If it's part of the premise of the world, "well" would be the expectation.