Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

561–570 of 1001 posts

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

#561

Post by skywhopper »

anal_reactor wrote: post #542
tns_admin wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, AI really lowered the bar for bad code in the name of delivering faster. I have seen people write highly complex code where all the complexity was not necessary. Think: deep unnecessary branching, pointless error handling and retries which make no sense in our context, hand-coded parsing using regexps, haphazard data flow, functions which seem purely computational but slyly make API calls, pointless…

When I read the discussions about AI making code worse I keep bringing the same argument: people made bad code even before AI. Average coder is barely functioning and that's a fact.

And we were safe from them because they couldn’t produce a mountain of code every day. But soon many places will be buried under a planet of unmaintainable code. It’s adding friction and operational cost and often not adding value.

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

#562

Post by xyzal »

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.…

I work at software in a medical setting. We are piloting an integration with a startup for measuring [some bodily variable relevant in ICU setting]. They are obviously vibecoding (docs are telling) and their API is failing in unexpected ways that they are not able to resolve. I am just waiting when this are going to harm somebody.

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

#563

Post by iLoveOncall »

YZF wrote: post #497
mittensc wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm seeing the exact opposite on a large C++ project. I have friends at other companies with similar projects, they say the same thing. It's like we're living in different worlds. Still, LLMs are nice for well defined small projects, microservices, tools and research.

What tools have you tried? Are we talking Codex GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.7? Would you say the project is well architected? Clear boundaries? Or ball of mud? How large is large? Are there AGENT.md files giving good information that helps LLMs get context when looking at a certain area of the code? Is it all in one repo? multiple repos? Are there good tests? I feel like these are some of the many variables that can make a di…

That's a lot of "ifs" for something supposed to revolutionize the industry.

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

#564

Post by xyzal »

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

[flagged]

[flagged]

I think discussion with open registration is doomed precisely for this reason, it is too open to being influenced by bad actors. Maybe the lobste.rs invitation model would be better ...

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

#565

Post by epolanski »

My biggest grief, among many, is that the field is just no longer enjoyable to work in.

I cannot deny the impact of AI for my daily tasks at this point.

But I just don't enjoy the field anymore. With increased productivity, also coming from my stellar coworkers, it feels like we're rat racing who outputs more.

The quality is good, and having very strong rails at language and implementation level, strong hygiene, etc helps tremendously.

But reality is that the pace of product vastly outpaces the pace at which I can absorb it's changes (I'm also in a very complex business logic field), and the same might be true about my understanding of the systems which are changing too fast for me to keep up.

I feel mentally fatigued from a long time, I don't enjoy coding no more bar the occasional relaxing personal project where I can spend the time I want without pressures on architectural or implementation details.

I'm increasingly thinking of changing field, this one is dying right under our eyes.

I often read comments about HN users still delving at their place with technical details or rewriting AI code to their liking.

I'm increasingly sure that these people live in happy bubbles where this luxury still exists. But this methodology of work is disappearing across the industry, team by team.

Of course SE will not disappear over night, but the productivity expectations, the complexity ballooning are raising the bar where only incredibly skilled and productive engineers will be still able to practice SE properly, and as long as they meet stakeholders expectations or keep living in those bubbles.

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

#566

Post by tomhow »

woeirua wrote: post #13
weinzierl wrote: post #4

"its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" Hmm, I agree with the point OP is making, but I'm not so sure this is the best supporting argument. The bottleneck is finding the bugs and if he'd criticized people saying AI will be the panacea to that I'd be with him, but people saying agents are fast and good at fixing human found bugs is nothing I'd object to. Agen…

[flagged]

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

Eschew flamebait.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#567

Post by utopiah »

vividfrier wrote: post #440

[flagged]

> I haven't written a single line of code myself [...] I need to understand the code

What's the difference? I don't think anybody get paid by how efficiently they type on a keyboard. If you to use a die or raise a crow to get your next keypress I honestly don't think your PM cares as long as the actual output you contribute to the project is something you are responsible for.

I'm not saying it has no implications on how you think or no costs socially, ecologically, politically, solely that nobody cares HOW you get the code, only in your ability to keep on making it increasingly work better, closer to the evolving needs of the project.

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

#568

Post by utopiah »

wrxd wrote: post #538

I’m at a FAANG and we have $300/day token quota. Personally I don’t use that much of it but management is pushing really hard for it. “the quota has been raised for a reason, use it”. Any task: “have you tried working on it with Claude?”. Every meeting “now engineer x and y will show you what he did with AI”. It’s not all useless but most of the days I think I would be more productive if some processes were streamlin…

Innovation signalling.

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

#569

Post by consumer451 »

SequoiaHope wrote: post #431
consumer451 wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Note that other types of engineering are also often vibes based. The mechanical engineering for a rocket engine is extremely rigorous but the engineering for an injection molded housing for a cheap cell phone is a lot more about following a few heuristics and getting it out the door. Even in robotics where I work, it’s mostly about making parts that pass whatever acceptance tests you come up with. In civil engineerin…

Sure, but as "software eats the world," maybe it should be the most formalized of all Engineering, as it runs everything...?
Post reply on HN