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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

#521

Post by hliyan »

consumer451 wrote: post #347
foxfired wrote: post #260

Maybe this is what will turn software engineering into an Engineering field. Right know, prompters are setting up whole company infrastructure. I personally know one. He migrated the companies database to a newer Postgres version. He was successful in the end, but I was gnawing my teeth when he described every step of the process. It sounded like "And then, I poured gasoline on the servers while smoking a cigarette.…

> Maybe this is what will turn software engineering into an Engineering field. Oh man, I think you may have touched the third rail here. My first job out of high school was as an AutoCAD/network admin at a large Civil & Structural firm. I later got further into tech, but after my initial experience with real Engineering, "software engineering" always made my eyes roll. Without real enforced standards, without consequ…

Perhaps this will make a comeback when the need arises to distinguish between actual software programmers and prompters.

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

#522

Post by microtonal »

vanuatu wrote: post #485
sph wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

What's up with all the new accounts astroturfing AI? There are multiple in these threads. People from the 'foundation model' companies having to keep up the AI hype?

Usually they provide grandiose claims (like the top-level comment) without any evidence or just anecdotal evidence that is not verifiable.

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

#523

Post by hliyan »

consumer451 wrote: post #347
foxfired wrote: post #260

Maybe this is what will turn software engineering into an Engineering field. Right know, prompters are setting up whole company infrastructure. I personally know one. He migrated the companies database to a newer Postgres version. He was successful in the end, but I was gnawing my teeth when he described every step of the process. It sounded like "And then, I poured gasoline on the servers while smoking a cigarette.…

> Maybe this is what will turn software engineering into an Engineering field. Oh man, I think you may have touched the third rail here. My first job out of high school was as an AutoCAD/network admin at a large Civil & Structural firm. I later got further into tech, but after my initial experience with real Engineering, "software engineering" always made my eyes roll. Without real enforced standards, without consequ…

This is actually not a bad exam to administer: https://ncees.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/FINAL_PE-Electr...

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

#524

Post by user34283 »

vividfrier wrote: post #440

[flagged]

Microservices in big companies where you have to first write the spec and then fully understand the changes is maybe among the least benefiting use cases yet.

When you work on just a new mobile app, this is where I find AI is making the biggest difference.

On mobile you don't need specs and you don't need to understand every detail of the implementation. You can QA test the app on a real device. It gives me more confidence than just having written the code myself, and it's much faster. You can implement multiple major features in a single day.

This kind of e2e testing is just not possible with backend services.

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

#526

Post by thisisit »

Recently I had a request come through to allow finance analysts to vibe code their apps. During a discussion one of the finance managers let the cat out of the bag. Turns out our CFO had met fellow CFOs at a get together. They talked about how each of them were using AI. Our CFO was lagging behind and felt that we need to "accelerate" our usage of AI. He wants to push it just because he lost a bragging contest.

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

#527

Post by gloflo »

designerarvid wrote: post #520
pbasista wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And I haven't written a single line of code myself since what - February maybe? Have you measured the impact of that on your ability to create good code? From my experience, relying on AI tends to degrade that ability. Also, you seem to be able to do all of what you say and benefit from AI tools because you seem to understand the overall bigger picture well enough to be able to drive the AI agents to do their work…

How good are you at writing assembly? What about junior people that take an introductory course in assembly but never practice it. Maybe I’m pushing it a bit, I know, but a couple of decades ago you could’ve been asking this instead.

That's a apples vs oranges comparison. Higher programming languages are still deterministic and not full of superstition.

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

#528

Post by ares623 »

designerarvid wrote: post #520
pbasista wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And I haven't written a single line of code myself since what - February maybe? Have you measured the impact of that on your ability to create good code? From my experience, relying on AI tends to degrade that ability. Also, you seem to be able to do all of what you say and benefit from AI tools because you seem to understand the overall bigger picture well enough to be able to drive the AI agents to do their work…

How good are you at writing assembly? What about junior people that take an introductory course in assembly but never practice it. Maybe I’m pushing it a bit, I know, but a couple of decades ago you could’ve been asking this instead.

The usual response to this is the "but high level languages are deterministic blah blah blah" (which IMO would be a good enough argument but well, we know how this goes now)

I posit a different argument. When you install a compiler on your computer, that compiler is "yours" for as long as you have the binary. You are able to completely forget about assembly because of 1. reliable _enough_ compiler 2. reliable access to said compiler.

Let's rewind decades back and pretend that the very first assembly compiler was behind a monthly subscription*. Do you think we'd be in the same place now?

Now the natural follow up to this "but the open models are close to SotA now". Well why aren't we using them? Do we really think we'd have a GNU moment for """open""" models? And are we willing to bet our industry on that?

But my point is, _these are not the same things_ and positing them as such is frankly insulting. How good are you at writing assembly when your compiler is inevitably taken away?

* I'm not a historian so I wouldn't be surprised some version of them were

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

#529

Post by ares623 »

thisisit wrote: post #526

Recently I had a request come through to allow finance analysts to vibe code their apps. During a discussion one of the finance managers let the cat out of the bag. Turns out our CFO had met fellow CFOs at a get together. They talked about how each of them were using AI. Our CFO was lagging behind and felt that we need to "accelerate" our usage of AI. He wants to push it just because he lost a bragging contest.

I call this Dinner Driven Development. That feeling of being Patrick Bateman when everyone is sharing their calling cards must be every C-suite's nightmare.

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

#530

Post by pbasista »

trizoza wrote: post #515

You're speaking of my company and I'm forever grateful. I'm afraid to say this out loud internally because I'm afraid of the next round of layoffs and I want to keep my job. So I just keep on shipping at a high pace, building massive cognitive debt and hoping the agents will get so good in near future, that there won't be the need for understanding the codebase.

> hoping the agents will get so good in near future, that there won't be the need for understanding the codebase

Agents might get better. But who will own the code and take responsibility for it? The AI agent? The company who created the AI agent?

If e.g. a car crashes and does not deploy its airbags because the AI agent made a mistake in the airbag code, will the manufacturer be able to shift the blame to OpenAI or Anthropic?

I do not think so.

And therefore I believe that no matter how good the AI agents will ever become, the ultimate responsibility for the code will always remain with the companies that create the code. Regardless of which AI tools they use.

I see no other way to bear that responsibility by the company than to have people internally who will be responsible. And those people, if they actually want to own that responsibility, would need to understand that code themselves, in my opinion. Because relying on a non-deterministic AI agent's vetting is fundamentally unreliable, in my opinion.

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