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

971–980 of 1001 posts

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

#971

Post by achierius »

epolanski wrote: post #722
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…

> In my experience, AI really lowered the bar for bad code in the name of delivering faster. I would've believed that 6 months ago, but not now. If you have a good codebase with proper rails, hygiene and architecture, AI will produce better code than most engineers out there. People forget that 90% of the field has always been charlatans barely able to implement a fizz buzz or go much beyond trial and error googling.…

90% of software engineers are not charlatans, and it's convenient that you at confidently place yourself in the "10%"

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

#972

Post by Scroll_Swe »

tredre3 wrote: post #753
Scroll_Swe wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Women lmao Are you under the impression that it's a woman's thing to anthropomorphize and/or desire an emotional relationship with a chatbot? Anecdotally I only know of men who have AI companions. Including very smart/highly paid engineers. The AI companion platforms also market more heavily towards men, because that's presumably where the audience is. The subreddit r/MyGirlfriendIsAI also exists as a counterpoint…

>Are you under the impression that it's a woman's thing to anthropomorphize and/or desire an emotional relationship with a chatbot?

No, but as always they are more vocal about it

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

#973

Post by naasking »

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.

> which is arguably more challenging than creating the solution.

This hasn't been the case in my experience. Devising a correct solution without a definition of the problem is impossible because you wouldn't recognize a correct solution without a definition. Often you discover the problem definition by exploratory programming and trial and error on solutions, but LLMs are still good for process this too. Arguably better because they type faster so you can iterate faster!

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

#974

Post by xnx »

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…

Sounds like wishful thinking by a human programmer. Probably more likely tools will be rewritten from requirements or the old code will be refactored by newer models.

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

#975

Post by Conscat »

checker659 wrote: post #946
Conscat wrote: post #911

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Please don’t tell me you’re writing RTL

I'm not, I work higher level products. I've talked to a few people who do but I don't recall if they have different standards.

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

#976

Post by goosejuice »

LtWorf wrote: post #924
goosejuice wrote: post #865

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compliance

I'm pretty sure with AI there is nothing that complies to anything. Staring with the fact that the whole industry is based on copyright infringement.

You're welcome to have opinions on that, but the answer to the person's question is objectively compliance. A corp can't get enterprise features like ZDR without switching to token based billing. That's why they aren't using subs.

This isn't some kind of new thing. There's always been an enterprise tax, like SSO.

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

#977

Post by dismalaf »

zombot wrote: post #935
dismalaf wrote: post #814

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The saying "the market is rational" simply means that assets are priced using all currently available information.

And then your bias makes you ignore all available information, so this doesn't mean anything.

Bias affects sentiment regarding future performance.

And it does mean things if you understand the meaning of the terms in the context of "finance".

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

#978

Post by eddythompson80 »

zahlman wrote: post #944
eddythompson80 wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now imagine if you’re one step removed. You don’t see the cigarettes, smell the gasoline, nor see the fire extinguisher gauge. You only see the servers running business-as-usual. Those “engineering” guys are always drama queens, you think. We have processes and fire extinguishers when shit hits the fan, right? That’s basically every M2, and many if not most M1s, in the last 10 years. So fuck it. Why does any of it ma…

... If it's been like that for 10 years then it can hardly be blamed on "AI".

Yes, you can’t blame AI for it. But it was a self limiting system. You couldn’t just go to a fresh college hire and ask them to do deep surgery on the entire stack. You would go to your very senior engineers for that. Those senior engineers will push back on some stuff then in the push-pull cycle you would have to settle at some middle ground.

With AI I’m seeing managers literally get an intern, ask them if they can change fundamental assumptions of a system, give the intern claude 1M window, have the intern ready with a 37k line PR in an afternoon and then go ping a senior engineer if they can “take a look”.

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

#979

Post by user205738 »

I was reminded of the universe of Doctor Who. It's an incredibly complex technology, but it often behaves either unpredictably, like AI agents, or like code written by a vibe-coder without understanding the architecture or boundary conditions. And programmers are more like architects of consciousness, building machines rather than writing code.

Similarly, when the Doctor hacks a PC, he doesn't write code but rather communicates with the computer, using diplomacy to crack the agent.

It is likely that we will come to a world where software solutions are "grown" by iterations of agent work, and no one will know exactly how it works.

I think this will happen. A quick, low-quality solution is more common than a solution created by a master craftsman.

In addition to low-quality furniture, bad knives, electric kettles that burn out after a week, and poorly cut clothes that don't fit, have unpleasant fabric, and fall apart, there will also be a disposable, rotting code.

Master programmers will remain, just as master craftsmen have remained. They may even continue to earn well. However, there will be fewer of them, and the requirements for their skills, knowledge, and reputation will increase.

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

#980

Post by codethief »

tns_admin wrote: post #474
shridharxp wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a junior dev there is this pressure to produce code, add features, and investigate bugs within unprecedented time period. I know whole code base is fking up but i will still add that feature or do a sloppy bug fix without digging deeper.

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…

I agree 100%. At work I'm teaching software engineering principles to system administrators and they, too, often use AI without thinking. Then it's on me to provide feedback on the PRs they barely read themselves. Not a lot of fun but slowly but surely they're learning.

> The worst part is, even when "prompted" by bad coders, it works in the end. Even has tests (ostensibly mock-ridden, a pet peeve of mine which always falls on deaf ears). So I cannot reject the PR without being an asshole.

Yes, you absolutely can. And you should. Try to teach them lessons and what patterns to watch out for, then tell them to put those insights in their CLAUDE.md, so that their agent becomes better, too. You can also tell them to just copy your own CLAUDE.md, like I did: https://github.com/codethief/ENGINEERING_PRINCIPLES.md

Stay strong!

Post reply on HN