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

951–960 of 1001 posts

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

#951

Post by renegade-otter »

hackthemack wrote: post #774
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.

It is a tale as old as time (in the industry) I wrote a while back, Most of the executives I have met really have no clue. They just go with what is being promoted in the space because it offers a safety net. Look, we are "not behind the curve!". We are innovating along with the rest of the industry. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46670190

"What, you guys are still not using Big Data? What's wrong?"

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

#952

Post by darkwater »

lovich wrote: post #918
darkwater wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going directly to the point here: those people have clearly mental issues that would and probably did already show in the past without AI as well.

I agree that these people had mental health issues. I think if they got to billionaire level and were surrounded by yes men they would have the same reaction. The difference nowadays is you can get the same surrounded by yes men experience for only 20 dollars a month so a lot more of the people who are primed for this sort of breakdown are now being exposed to it due to the decrease in cost.

That is a possibility indeed, I agree. There are mild mental issues that might have gone under the radar before and are now magnified by the AI sycophancy. I'm no mental health expert so I can't really tell but it does make some intuitive sense.

Edit: but at the same time there are issues that were always there and Just manifestate in new ways. A bit like addiction, you can have an addictive personality already, but if you get addicted on heroin is much much worse that on tobacco.

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

#953

Post by kmacdough »

0xpgm wrote: post #606
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.

Things like this make me realize the software engineering 'industry' is not a real industry. There are people who write important software that the world runs on, but they do it outside the 'industry'. A real industry should be responsive to events of nature, or at least the market, not vibes.

Hate to break it to ya, but this is how most C-suites operate. Their job isn't to run a company well. It's to appear to the board/investors that they're running a good company.

It is a better play to do the popular thing in a way that measures as "ahead". Then it's hard to argue against a raise. But if you stick your neck out on your thoughtful expertise, it can take years or more for the value to come thru. You can easily be replaced by then.

The only antidote is a board that has a real working nuanced understanding of the entire industry. But this rarely happens, for many reasons.

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

#954

Post by renegade-otter »

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.

Hospitals? Vibe code?

Dear Lord. Respect to your friend for mad marketing skills, however. Selling slop to mission-critical sectors is next level.

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

#955

Post by throwa356262 »

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…

It is fairly easy to tokenmax by having and inefficient automation set up.

Not something I would do personally. But it is surprisingly easy to set up a claw that eats half of your token budget in a meaningless "research" task. Set it up as a cron job and you will soon be promoted for being an AI visionary

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

#956

Post by doginasuit »

renegade-otter wrote: post #948
doginasuit wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never had more fun coding, but the key is actually still writing the code yourself. The LLM has terrible judgment but an encyclopedic knowledge and the ability to pick out important details in a sea of information. Their worse use is producing code, but somehow that gets all the energy. Being an LLM babysitter is energy draining and you feel less and less in control. No job is worth being miserable doing somethi…

After turning off my brain a few times and ending up in a place I don't want real fast, I am learning to ride this dragon. And, you are right - use it as a fast typer, not a fast thinkier. And for those who claim that AI is a good code writer - wrong. It can OUTPUT a wall of code, but it's overeager to flood you will legacy code on arrival to "solve a problem". It's harder to write LESS code, which is still the goal…

> And, you are right - use it as a fast typer, not a fast thinkier.

That's a great way to put it.

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

#957

Post by doginasuit »

IX-103 wrote: post #873
doginasuit wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never had more fun coding, but the key is actually still writing the code yourself. The LLM has terrible judgment but an encyclopedic knowledge and the ability to pick out important details in a sea of information. Their worse use is producing code, but somehow that gets all the energy. Being an LLM babysitter is energy draining and you feel less and less in control. No job is worth being miserable doing somethi…

In my experience, its the opposite. The AI is very good at writing code, but it is unreliable at any kind of design. I use it as a fancy form of autocomplete. I give the broad strokes: "add a method here and change all but this one caller to use the new method", "Apply this design pattern here for this change but don't do this other thing". It completes the task reasonably well and sometimes even remembers to run the…

Fancy autocomplete is a solid use. I use the same pattern replication technique whenever the situation allows for it. It's great for following your lead, but unreliable at taking the lead. Even if it was more reliable, I won't have the same working knowledge of the structure it created.

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

#958

Post by heresie-dabord »

kalkin wrote: post #698

I think there's a reasonable argument that our entire society right now is under AI psychosis: The stock market keeps going up in the face of the indefinite closure of Hormuz. We're investing in datacenters at a scale that only makes sense if AI capabilities continue to advance to the point where they surpass most humans at most white collar tasks, if not reach superintelligence. And what are the possible outcomes? -…

> Either way, it sure seems like we're collectively operating more in the interests of the future AI than in the interests of humanity. What is this, if not a sort of psychosis?

If we want to understand a phenomenon, we should be careful with technical terms. It is not "psychosis" [1] anymore than bad software that makes mistakes is "hallucinating".

The truth is simpler and less dramatic: hapless ambition-monkeys who climb the corporate ladder are demonstrating that they are not promoted for mental acuity. Corporations, after all, do not serve "the interests of humanity" — they are an organised collusion system that diffuses responsibility and anonymises negligence. And when it works as intended, shareholders rejoice.

For companies that can afford to build data centres, the latter are seen as a sure bet that can't fail, like building a bridge or buying new computer/hardware now with the pile of cash on hand without necessarily knowing which OS/software they will install. They are even planning to restart or build nuclear reactors. [2]

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/psychosis

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/28/why-microsoft-amazon-google-...

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

#959

Post by mindv0rtex »

Conscat wrote: post #911
mancerayder wrote: post #728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

300 a day?? 7K dollars a month? No wonder they need to lay people off!

At Nvidia, we have no limit for Anthropic or Open AI models (for now) and are heavily encouraged to use them as much as possible.

The fact that they've started promoting using the Caveman mode tells me that the unlimited usage policy is taking its toll.

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

#960

Post by doginasuit »

sph wrote: post #921
IX-103 wrote: post #873

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, its the opposite. The AI is very good at writing code, but it is unreliable at any kind of design. I use it as a fancy form of autocomplete. I give the broad strokes: "add a method here and change all but this one caller to use the new method", "Apply this design pattern here for this change but don't do this other thing". It completes the task reasonably well and sometimes even remembers to run the…

Can you pro-AI people at least agree on what is it even useful for? Every thread is endless back-and-forth between the "AI works great and vibe coding is the future" and "no, AI works great as long as you don't vibe code" camps.

Is it so hard to imagine that people who find LLMs useful might have different perspectives on it? If you put a lot of energy into being against something you might think that everyone who doesn't agree puts the same energy into being in favor of it, but that's not real life.
Post reply on HN