631–640 of 1001 posts
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…
> Purely AI written systems will scale to a point of complexity that no human can ever understand In their current forms, it's unlikely for a product that actually needs to work. It's not getting that complex and working with current LLMs .
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> 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I feel like I'm in a different field compared to the rest of hacker news. That should be my line. My new employer does not use LLMs at all. Software development, marketing, hardware development, nothing. Maybe too little, but whatever. The problems the company is facing are entirely unrelated to "throughput".
That's great. Is it possible to have any means of private communication with you where you would share the information who this employer is?
As implied, my employer's product is not software, but rather hardware. This hardware does of course run firmware and software and needs to interface with other systems. It's entirely B2B. All this combined makes work relatively relaxed.
Calling this "psychosis" is maybe a neologism but it's apt in perspective.
All that's actually new with "AI psychosis" is an acceleration of that phenomenon. The agents will summarize status faster than any middle manager. Claude will happily draw you any "up-and-to-the-right" graph you please, with the most common contemporary examples being "tokens burned" and "lines of code written". And vibe coding doesn't even require paying the cost of a mass layoff to get the "familiarity debt".
There have always been both good and bad engineering leaders. No tool will magically make a bad leader into a good leader overnight. There is nothing new under the sun.
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…
Also at a FAANG here. Surprised you don't manage to use $300 in a whole day. It's almost trivial to productively use that much in under an hour. Leadership is not being dumb, at least on this topic. If your token usage is that low, you just aren't using AI that much (even if you think you are.)
Worth also noting is that while there is plenty to criticize about AI use — especially any cultish behavior surrounding it — plenty of naïveté about the quality of its results, there is a also a strain of categorical opposition to it among some tech people that is equally off and that has all the hallmarks of the chickens coming home to roost.
For years, many in tech gladly “automated away” all sorts of jobs. Large salaries were showered on them for doing so, or at least promising to do so (there was and is plenty of bullshit here, too). Now, AI appears to threaten to derail the tech gravy train, especially for SWE work that’s run-of-the-mill (which is most of it). Now automation is bad. It’s a delicious juxtaposition.
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…
What I'm seeing is a little eternal September of support tickets about programs that fail to interface the JSON API of a customer of mine. The API is always allucinated. In the best case there are out of place attributes. Often they don't exist at all. I've seen x, y, width, height when we have only top and left. Of course no human read the documentation. Those are probably founders vibe coding a client without the t…