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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

#361

Post by danparsonson »

monkpit wrote: post #323
jimbokun wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans who have been writing systems like that for many years know how to maintain and modify them successfully. It’s just that our industry has a bias towards youth who don’t think they have anything to learn from those who came before them.

> Humans who have been writing systems like that for many years know how to maintain and modify them successfully. Do they??

Yeah... in my experience people who code like that 'successfully' make modifications that fix an immediate problem while kicking another bug or two further down the road in a never-ending sunk-cost-fallacy of job security...

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

#362

Post by djeastm »

jimbokun wrote: post #281
hughw wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's so easy now to redo it all ground up, and if models improve, do it better next time. I exaggerate only a little.

How much is your budget for tokens?

As long as it's under the budget for X number of senior software devs, it seems competitive.

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

#363

Post by hattmall »

ramoz wrote: post #135
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…

A non-technical friend of mine has just won some hospital contracts after vibecoding w/ Claude an inventory management solution for them. They gave him access to IT dept servers and he called me extremely lost on how to deploy (cant connect Claude to them) and also frustrated because the app has some sort of interesting data/state issues.

I'd really like to know how he won contracts, just in general. Did he have some connections. And he doesn't even know how to get it to run on a server by himself? There's millions of people that can do that, if he can win contracts why worry about vibe coding at all, just hire someone to do it. Winning contracts is the challenge in my view.

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

#364

Post by hattmall »

badtuple wrote: post #315
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've already done a handful of these gigs for early vibecoded products that had collapsed in on themselves. The scope of work was to stabilize the product and only make existing features work. The issues have all been structural, not local. It's easier to treat it like a rewrite using the original as a super detailed product spec. Working on the existing codebase works, but you have to aggressively modularize everyth…

How do you find this type of work??

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

#365

Post by mcmcmc »

Yokohiii wrote: post #301
mcmcmc wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Mitchell. Psychosis is a serious psychiatric condition that can be induced or triggered by AI. “AI psychosis” in this context is a misuse of a clinical term. Your tweet describes a disagreement on a value judgment that boils down to “move fast and break things” with high trust in AI outputs vs going all in on quality and reliability with low trust in AI. It’s an engineering tradeoff like any other. Claiming that t…

He uses "AI psychosis" as a description of people that are overzealous on AI. He is obviously not a person that can or would diagnose mental illness. To the wider audience on HN the phrasing is pretty clear. An outsider with a tiny bit or intellectual charity wouldn't come to conclusions like you do.

People would understand what he meant if he called someone awkward “autistic” too. It’s wrong to use medical terms as slang because it erases the actual meaning and disregards the lived experience of people who have been through the condition. People who have been around psychosis would come to the same conclusion. The majority of the population not having that exposure doesn’t make it right. It’s tasteless and inappropriate.

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

#366

Post by lovich »

abr0ahm wrote: post #264
lovich wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t think just offloading your thinking to AI was AI psychosis. To me AI psychosis is the handful of friends I’ve had who have done things like have a full on mourning session when a model updates because they lost a friend/lover, the one guy who won’t speak to his family directly but has them talk to ChatGPT first and then has ChatGPT generate his response, or the two who are confident that they have discovered…

I'm curious how to best define what AI psychosis actually is. My understanding is that regular psychosis involves someone taking bits and pieces of facts or real world events and chaining them into a logical order or interpolating meanings or explanations which feel real and obvious to the patient but are not sufficiently backed by evidence and thus not in line with our widely accepted understanding of reality. AI ps…

You speak like a bot and are a brand new account. Thank you for whoever set this up to add to the problem.

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

#367

Post by devin »

jimbokun wrote: post #275
leoc wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 more defects than they close and the whole system will be unstable. Wow, it’s true, AI really is set to match human performance on large, complex software systems! ;)

Humans who have been writing systems like that for many years know how to maintain and modify them successfully. It’s just that our industry has a bias towards youth who don’t think they have anything to learn from those who came before them.

This is sadly so true.

I have really tried as an "old" person in the field to try and pass on the stuff I've learned, but "craft" and such really has absolutely no home in modern dev culture. The people who care about history, the craft, etc. are increasingly rare.

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

#369

Post by xstas1 »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #356
m463 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Purely AI written systems will scale to a point of complexity that no human can ever understand I think it will be needless verbose complexity. I kind of imagine someone having an unlimited budget of free amazon stuff shipped to their house. In theory, they are living a prosperous life of plenty. In reality, they will be drowning in something that isn't prosperity.

I don't understand this point of view at all. There's a symmetry that is going entirely unappreciated by most of the comments in the thread: just as I can give Claude X,000 words of text to use to describe the code I want it to write, I can also give it some existing code and ask for X,000 words of text explaining what it does. (Call it, oh, I don't know, a "spec," maybe.) The explanation, in turn, can be fed back to…

Code is not spec. There is an implementation spectrum.

On one end, you have code that can perform only the behaviour explicitly declared in the spec, but has to be thrown away and rewritten for any new or updated spec.

On the other end, you have code that implements or anticipates a wide range of future possible specs including the given one.

The AI can operate on any point on this spectrum, but it's not very good at choosing. The more complex the software, the more such choices need to be made.

When the number of bad choices reaches a certain critical mass, even a skilled engineer becomes powerless to undo all the bad choices, and even a powerful model becomes unable to reduce it back to a coherent spec.

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

#370

Post by badtuple »

hattmall wrote: post #364
badtuple wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've already done a handful of these gigs for early vibecoded products that had collapsed in on themselves. The scope of work was to stabilize the product and only make existing features work. The issues have all been structural, not local. It's easier to treat it like a rewrite using the original as a super detailed product spec. Working on the existing codebase works, but you have to aggressively modularize everyth…

How do you find this type of work??

I've worked with many people over the years. A bunch of product people have struck out to make their own thing now that they can get a feedback loop going. I just keep in touch with people. They know my services are available, so if they have a need they reach out.

The greatest asset in this type of work is genuinely liking people, being good at what you do, and keeping in touch. My email is easily findable for a reason.

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