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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

#461

Post by dotancohen »

biophysboy wrote: post #103
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…

The way I put this to myself is that AI gives “correct correct answers and incorrect correct answers”. They almost always generate logically correct text, but sometimes that text has a set of incorrect implicit assumptions and decisions that may not be valid for the use case. Generating a correct correct solution requires proper definition of the problem, which is arguably more challenging than creating the solution.

The way I phrase this to others is: Language models produce linguistically valid sentences, not factually correct sentences.

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

#462

Post by sph »

jimbokun wrote: post #268

This reminds me of Rich Hickey’s “Simple Made Easy” and his approach in making Clojure. Even before LLMs generating entire programs, complex frameworks allowed developers to write the initial versions of programs very quickly, but at the cost of being hard to understand and thus hard to debug or modify. Some of us are betting that the AIs will always be smart enough to debug, maintain and modify the programs written…

Ah, a cognitive Moore’s law, so to speak.

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

#463

Post by ctxc »

skydhash wrote: post #458
suzzer99 wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve had to do a ton of SQL stuff lately, which I haven’t really worked with since the late 90s. ChatGPT has been a godsend, not just for me, but for our only coworker who knows SQL well, whom I’d probably be bugging several times a day at my wits’ end. But no one cares about those kinds of productivity gains. Just the ones that will completely replace us.

I'm always amazed by those comments. Why couldn't you buy a book on SQL[0], and spend a week on it? Or just go over to YouTube for a refresher? [0]: Like https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/sql-queries-for/9780134...

When you have a general idea of what smells bad vs what's okay...why?

I'd rather get it from the LLM and review

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

#464

Post by thefourthchime »

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…

My company and my buddy's company, we're experiencing the same thing. We are trying to fire a SAAS vendor and it's become the hot new project. Now we to these meetings with 50 different people that are allegedly stakeholders, two or three product managers who have already vibcoded their version of something.

Ultimately, if you want to move fast, it's better just to have one engineer vibe coding something. but, that engineer is under so much pressure. Now he's got a legacy mode and another legacy mode because the requirements keep changing. And now there's a deadline in four weeks.

This all could work just fine, but the ungodly amount of attention that this world is getting puts too many cooks in the kitchen, which is always a recipe for disaster.

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

#465

Post by jgraettinger1 »

zarzavat wrote: post #455
vividfrier wrote: post #440

[flagged]

Some programmers are gardeners. It sounds like you're one too. Your job is to maintain a large existing codebase. You probably didn't understand the entire codebase before AI, nobody did, so it doesn't matter that you don't understand it now. AI is very good at gardening, nobody doubts that. Other programmers are painters. Their job is to start with a blank canvas and create something that others will value. When AI…

The right metaphor isn't painting, though, it's molding clay. That first pass is slop, but it's raw clay that the agent is very good at molding given a modicum of direction and "not this, do that" comments. The combined first-pass and reshaping time is still far less than writing by hand from scratch. And increasingly, that first pass is ... not bad?

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

#466

Post by cstrahan »

sph wrote: post #444
vividfrier wrote: post #440

[flagged]

[flagged]

That seems like an odd way to interpret what they wrote.

Imagine old school machinists saying to a CNC machinist “Ha! See, maybe you don’t jog the axes manually, but you still have to be involved in placing the stock material, and you have to do the CAD/CAM work - so did it really machine the part for you? No!”

AI is a tool like any other. It has its limitations. It has classes of problems that it is suited to handle, and others it isn’t. If it’s true that they haven’t written (as in “typed out by hand”) a single line of code, why can’t they say that without you making that statement into more than it is?

I haven’t written a single line of code in 6 months, and that’s simply fact. It is also true that I put in a lot of other work to make that feasible, but that work isn’t in the form of writing code.

“it’s mature and the next step of engineering”

Tautologically, it’s mature enough for what it is mature enough for, and it certainly is the next step in the same way that CNC was the next step for machining — if you’re not using it as a machinist, you’re going to produce less compared to those who are.

Same thing with garden hoses. Yes, you can go fetch water from a lake and splash it on your lawn, or, you know, you could just use a sprinkler connected to your garden hose. Doesn’t replace buckets. Buckets just have a narrower scope in a world where garden hoses exist.

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

#467

Post by nialse »

Sharlin wrote: post #97
999900000999 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the new normal. AI will continue to reduce the need for human workers until a Universal Basic Income is established. At the end of the day robots can do the vast vast majority of jobs better and faster. If not now, very soon. I only worry our economic systems won’t keep up

I think that’s called "hopium". Or wishful thinking, in less trendy language.

”Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.

It is the opium of the people.”

Some are on copium, some on hopium. The gods change names; the need for relief remains.

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

#469

Post by thefourthchime »

hughw wrote: post #224
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…

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.

Pretty much. We're intensely vibe coding something that has gone through so many requirement changes. The code has become very gnarly. I took a stab at basically one prompt rewrite of the whole thing. And it wasn't there, but it was 80% of the way there. and a hell of a lot cleaner.
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