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Your CEO is suffering from AI psychosis

handyai.substack.com

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Re: Your CEO is suffering from AI psychosis

#21

Post by shdon »

Bill Gates famously said something along the lines of "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight". Now we're measuring AI effectiveness by the number of tokens generated? Plus ça change...

And yeah, what is it with C level executives and AI? I'm pretty much getting it forced on me by the higher ups. Management has insisted all employees come up with ideas on how to "leverage AI most effectively for the business". And now we're hiring an AI expert... For the small internal IT team of a publishing company...

At one point, I spent so much time fixing the disastrous results of people using ChatGPT to generate oodles of CSS that they would put in the WordPress Customizer that I had to resort to disabling the custom CSS functionality entirely. All because they wanted a link to be a different colour.

Re: Your CEO is suffering from AI psychosis

#22

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #10

I was under the impression that the tokenmaxxing phenomenon was mostly propaganda from the hyperscalers and their vendors to keep the AI funding gravy train alive and prevent demand collapse from popping the bubble. The big catastrope for valuations is if supply outruns demand. Videogen has not reached the expected traction and profitability, so now we're talking about 1000x code output as a success metric. But that'…

> I was under the impression that the tokenmaxxing phenomenon was mostly propaganda from the hyperscalers and their vendors to keep the AI funding gravy train alive and prevent demand collapse from popping the bubble.

It's not. A lot of companies who wouldn't otherwise be terribly exposed are getting in on it. The steelman argument for it is - if you think that the optimal software development strategy is going to be much different in 2027 than it was in 2025, and you have a lot of money to burn, it may well be worth having your devs go wild trying everything to see what works.

(Of course, that steelman is very compatible with a story where the best strategies don't end up using very many tokens and a bubble pop happens anyway.)

Re: Your CEO is suffering from AI psychosis

#23

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

baw-bag wrote: post #5

Is there a term for something similar? My boss is injecting hopium. He barely sleeps compiling massive massive documents which don't answer anything. We literally have a "(LILR Design Language)" spec which when you keep slicing through it, doesn't actually say anything. It takes 70 seconds to full scroll through it with the fast scroll mechanism, but the whole thing boils down to "basically if it looks good then its…

We gave our bosses access and they mostly gave up after discovering how hard it was to get things past CI. YMMV if you have fewer or healthier tests.

Re: Your CEO is suffering from AI psychosis

#24

Post by strken »

baw-bag wrote: post #5

Is there a term for something similar? My boss is injecting hopium. He barely sleeps compiling massive massive documents which don't answer anything. We literally have a "(LILR Design Language)" spec which when you keep slicing through it, doesn't actually say anything. It takes 70 seconds to full scroll through it with the fast scroll mechanism, but the whole thing boils down to "basically if it looks good then its…

We just got sent a document that amounted to "please set up a CNAME for us", but was multiple pages long and had detailed instructions on how to do various troubleshooting tasks before, during, and after creating the CNAME, mixed in so that it was impossible to tell what the actual request was.

Had all the classic LLM signs. Underuse of commas. No longer sentences. No other punctuation except full stops and em dashes. Just sudden negation at the end of three barely related concepts.

I'm so unbelievably sick of reading this slop. For the love of God, it's more work to turn bullet points into an unreadable multipage document, so just send me the bullet points. I don't want to communicate with a gigantic vector representing the average person's literacy anymore.

Re: Your CEO is suffering from AI psychosis

#25

Post by wjnc »

baw-bag wrote: post #5

Is there a term for something similar? My boss is injecting hopium. He barely sleeps compiling massive massive documents which don't answer anything. We literally have a "(LILR Design Language)" spec which when you keep slicing through it, doesn't actually say anything. It takes 70 seconds to full scroll through it with the fast scroll mechanism, but the whole thing boils down to "basically if it looks good then its…

In highly bureaucratic companies there starts to exist a value for bureaucracy ‘per se’. This can be found in endlessly growing risk and operational policies. Actually, one is lucky if the policies don’t say much. That means that the bureaucracy is trying to stay out of the way of operations. So while bureaucracy is a way of management and staff departments to fulfill their needs, the fish are still being caught.

One step up on the ladder is that the fish aren’t being caught anymore due to regulations pertaining the hooks (disallowed) and the length of the line. The fishermen complaining are being told that the regulators are also complaining and that management has decided that complaints everywhere are the best balance.

Re: Your CEO is suffering from AI psychosis

#26

Post by Suppafly »

strken wrote: post #24
baw-bag wrote: post #5

Is there a term for something similar? My boss is injecting hopium. He barely sleeps compiling massive massive documents which don't answer anything. We literally have a "(LILR Design Language)" spec which when you keep slicing through it, doesn't actually say anything. It takes 70 seconds to full scroll through it with the fast scroll mechanism, but the whole thing boils down to "basically if it looks good then its…

We just got sent a document that amounted to "please set up a CNAME for us", but was multiple pages long and had detailed instructions on how to do various troubleshooting tasks before, during, and after creating the CNAME, mixed in so that it was impossible to tell what the actual request was. Had all the classic LLM signs. Underuse of commas. No longer sentences. No other punctuation except full stops and em dashes…

>We just got sent a document that amounted to "please set up a CNAME for us", but was multiple pages long and had detailed instructions on how to do various troubleshooting tasks before, during, and after creating the CNAME, mixed in so that it was impossible to tell what the actual request was.

I noticed shit like that pre-AI, but at least then it was written by a person and conceivably useful info, even if redundant and not always necessary. I can't imagine how bad it's going to get with all the AI slop now.

Re: Your CEO is suffering from AI psychosis

#27

Post by johntash »

shdon wrote: post #21

Bill Gates famously said something along the lines of "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight". Now we're measuring AI effectiveness by the number of tokens generated? Plus ça change... And yeah, what is it with C level executives and AI? I'm pretty much getting it forced on me by the higher ups. Management has insisted all employees come up with ideas o…

> what is it with C level executives and AI?

My assumption is that they are extremely excited about AI, because they are also extremely excited about being able to reduce their workforce while expecting more output from smaller teams.

Re: Your CEO is suffering from AI psychosis

#28

Post by parodysbird »

baw-bag wrote: post #5

Is there a term for something similar? My boss is injecting hopium. He barely sleeps compiling massive massive documents which don't answer anything. We literally have a "(LILR Design Language)" spec which when you keep slicing through it, doesn't actually say anything. It takes 70 seconds to full scroll through it with the fast scroll mechanism, but the whole thing boils down to "basically if it looks good then its…

Stimulants

Re: Your CEO is suffering from AI psychosis

#30

Post by 2001zhaozhao »

> But the conversation in the AI community is ignorantly staying at the level of “lol CEOs are dumb” rather than grappling with a very clear structural problem: the tools themselves are incentivized to make you feel good, the platforms built on those tools are incentivized to sell you scale, and the culture around both punishes skepticism.

This. So much this.

It's so hard to sell an agentic platform that's designed to push real work compared to one that is designed to look flashy. (Spoiler alert: the one that outputs real work is way more useful, way more difficult to build, and less flashy because they can't just sell pure fantasies like the idea of automated CEO/managers.)

It's not just the CEOs that have the psychosis problem, it's investors as well. And for even technical users it's hard to tell the difference, but comparatively it's much easier to sell AIs on actual merit to very technical people than to non-technical people.

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