<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hachyderm.io&#x2F;@mitchellh&#x2F;116580433508108130" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hachyderm.io&#x2F;@mitchellh&#x2F;116580433508108130</a>

Seems broken.  It just throws up an anime cat girl for me.

&lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twiiit.com&#x2F;mitchellh&#x2F;status&#x2F;2055380239711457578" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twiiit.com&#x2F;mitchellh&#x2F;status&#x2F;2055380239711457578</a>&gt; – will redirect to a currently-working Nitter instance.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xcancel.com&#x2F;mitchellh&#x2F;status&#x2F;2055380239711457578" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xcancel.com&#x2F;mitchellh&#x2F;status&#x2F;2055380239711457578</a>

More likely people thought GP was missing the point; &quot;MTTR-optimized YOLO deployment&quot; only succeeds against recoverable errors and acceptable periods of downtime against errors that are detected quickly. You could have a bug silently corrupting data for months, and that data may only be used by 1 critical process that runs once every quarter. So you could introduce a timebomb that can&#x27;t be gracefully recovered from (depending on the nature of the data corruption).So the point is not that agents cannot find bugs (they certainly can), it&#x27;s whether you can shirk reviewing for bugs if MTTR is fast enough. There are circumstances where YOLO is appropriate, but they aren&#x27;t the production environment of a mature application.

&gt; won’t concede until you can just ask Codex or Opus “find and fix all the bugs in thisBut this is just holding the Slop Companies to the standard they declared themselves! Just recently, the CEO of OpenAI babbled some nonsense on twitter about how he hands over tasks to Codex who according to him, finishes them flawlessly while he is playing with his kid outside.&gt; but soon we will be.Ah yes, in the 3-6 months, right? This time next year Rodney, we&#x27;ll be millionaires!

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.Please don&#x27;t sneer, including at the rest of the community.Eschew flamebait.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>

The tweet is criticizing over-reliance on the &quot;agents will fix it anyway&quot;.The fact that we can fix things faster now doesn&#x27;t mean that we should throw away caution and prevention. The specific point of his tweet is that we&#x27;re seeing a lot of people starting to skip proper release engineering.Agents are quick to fix bugs, yes, but it doesn&#x27;t mean that users will tolerate software that gets completely broken after each new feature is introduced and takes a certain number of days to heal each time.

&gt; Agents are fixing bugs so quickly and at a scale humans can&#x27;t do already.The metric is how many defects are introduced per defect fixed. Being fast is bad if this ratio is above one.

&gt; Agents are fixing bugs so quickly and at a scale humans can&#x27;t do already.This is an illusion, I assure you. On a side project of mine with behavior that&#x27;s very hard to translate into an algorithm (never mind code), after a few failed attempts between the both of us, I figured it out. I gave the AI (Opus) an extremely specific algorithm with detailed tests. All completely and utterly ignored (including the tests), like I never even said it. It proudly declared the work done without ever having written the tests that would have proved that wrong - it basically wrote code that didn&#x27;t change behavior at all, it just gave the illusion of looking busy.That&#x27;s just a single extreme example that comes to mind, but I&#x27;ve had it ignore me at least 4-5 times a day this week.If you think agents are fixing things reliably then you simply haven&#x27;t noticed that they are &quot;looking busy.&quot;

&quot;its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can&#x27;t do!&quot;Hmm, I agree with the point OP is making, but I&#x27;m not so sure this is the best supporting argument.
The bottleneck is finding the bugs and if he&#x27;d criticized people saying AI will be the panacea to that I&#x27;d be with him, but people saying agents are fast and good at fixing human found bugs is nothing I&#x27;d object to.Agents are fixing bugs so quickly and at a scale humans can&#x27;t do already.

I was rewatching Rich Hickey&#x27;s &quot;Simple Made Easy&quot; talk (as one does) and there was a great line about full test coverage.&quot;What&#x27;s true about all bugs in production? (pause for dramatic effect) They all passed the tests!&quot; (well, he said typechecker but I think the point stands)

&quot;no no, it has full test coverage&quot;at least at my BigCo, AI is being used for everything - writing slop, writing tests, code reviews, etc.it would make sense to use AI for writing code, but human code review. or, human code, but AI test cases... or whatever combination of cross-checking, trust-but-verify, human in the loop, etc. people prefer.i think once it gets used for everything, people have lost the plot, it&#x27;s the inmates running the asylum.

Most labs are shilling “AI worker” dreams to these very companies

it is required now, or all civilization collapses.

There was not a renaissance to move back to Assembly when Java sucked. Instead more Java developers were created.

Another argument for less human-like AI then, I guess.

Will never happen, for the exact reason that we’ve almost never done that for human output either.

The entire stock market is undergoing AI psychosis.

Well a 2008 and a 2000 level financial crash is required for this. It is always during euphoric levels of delusion such events then occur....and it also needs more so-called AI companies present in the wreckage in this crash.AI psychosis is undeniably real.

They are being developed, but it takes over a decade for this to happen normally

Humans can already have 4 hour work week without productivity loss.But I only see mass layoffs and those who are working - are working longer and harder then before.

The exact same thing was meant to happen when the desktop computer became prevalent. Then the internet. Look at us now.

Because of the concerns you cite, I think working out the basic economic systems and incentives for paying people is a much more pressing concern than building magnificent machinery that we don&#x27;t even own.  There has been no effort on their end to demonstrate good faith nor to uphold their end of the social contract, which is why it&#x27;s in our hands to demand the fundamentals to lead a life of dignity.

I think that’s called &quot;hopium&quot;. Or wishful thinking, in less trendy language.

You’re forgetting the energy part of the equation.

Is this a broken bot account or you’re speed running “regarded Twitter user”?

This is the new normal. AI will continue to reduce the need for human workers until a Universal Basic Income is established.At the end of the day robots can do the vast vast majority of jobs better and faster. If not now, very soon.I only worry our economic systems won’t keep up

if all the resources spent in useless wars were poured into working towards this goal, we would be there for some time already

<pre><code> I like to think,
 (it has to be!)
 of a cybernetic ecology
 where we are free of our labors
 and joined back to nature,
 returned to our mammal
 brothers and sisters,
 and all watched over
 by machines of loving grace.
</code></pre>
-- Richard Brautigan (1967)

&gt; When [...] all outputs are formally verified based on exquisite architectures and standardsand we all live in a green utopia of flying cars and peace upon the world.

The people were longing for utopia, just not the same utopia.

I like how you haven&#x27;t wagered which exquisite architectures and standards. I am sure we will all agree on what they are and follow them the same way :)

I&#x27;m starting to long for the age after AI. When the generative euphoria has settled and all outputs are formally verified based on exquisite architectures and standards.

Assuming he’s right, I don’t see how that constitutes “psychosis”, as opposed to this beyond yet another of a billion examples of companies jumping on a bandwagon &#x2F; cargo cult, and then learning they took it too far.And also, he might not be right. But the good news is, we’ll all get to find out together!

On the bright side, my guillotine &amp; rope startup is going to make a killing (no pun intended).

Or anyone who even wants VC funding. 90+% of investors only want to invest in AI companies.If you&#x27;re not doing AI there&#x27;s an incredibly limited pool of people who will give you $$$ ... and you&#x27;re competing with EVERY OTHER NON-AI COMPANY for their attention.

Anyone who&#x27;s taken VC funding has no choice. More money has been spent on AI commercialization than the atomic bomb, the US interstate build-out, the ISS and the Apollo program combined. Failure is going to be catastrophic and therefore, one tied to this ship cannot accept a world in which it fails.

Occams&#x27; razor would assume the former.

Either this or we humans are out of the picture soon.

Codex is freakin hot-to-trot to churn out test coverage for every single thing it implements, and some of it is very esoteric and highly prescriptive (regexes for days) BUT .. after a while, it dawned on me that LLM-driven test coverage is less about proving “code correctness” (you’re better off writing those tests yourself alongside them), and more about just trying to ensure that whatever gets bolted on stays bolted on. For better or worse, obviously, since if you bolt on trash, trash you shall have.

Wholeheartedly agree, but in fairness, I trust the tests of the best AI models more than those of the average human developer. There&#x27;s a lot of people around that combine high diligence with complete intellectual laziness, producing tons of useless tests.Actually no, cancel that. I realise now that I trust AIs more than the average developer, period. At this point they do produce better code than most people I&#x27;ve dealt with.

There&#x27;s a very old paper by Cem Kaner about the meaninglessness of &quot;100% coverage&quot; where he included an appendix where he enumerates 101 different possible types of code coverage: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.researchgate.net&#x2F;publication&#x2F;243782285_Software_Negligence_Testing_Coverage" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.researchgate.net&#x2F;publication&#x2F;243782285_Software_...</a>

&gt; &quot;no no, it has full test coverage&quot;i don&#x27;t have enough fingers (and toes) to count how many times i&#x27;ve demonstrated that &quot;100% coverage&quot; is almost universally bullshit.

You are breaking the analogy because automobiles are machines for transportation, and understanding them is important to make them move. LLMs are machines to understand, and well, if they do the understanding you don&#x27;t need to.

I am sure you will feel that this is missing the point of your analogy, but we would not have gotten very far with automobiles if we didn&#x27;t know how they worked.

Very funny, this. Did we need forward deployed engineers to convince people that they absolutely need to use the trains in order to &quot;not be left behind&quot;? Or otherwise hype? Or was it sort of obvious and did not need to explained so much - like a bad joke called LLMs ?

If you want to draw that line of argument - it&#x27;s more like horse riders being convinced to give up their horses in favour of trains: You&#x27;re travelling faster, don&#x27;t have to navigate yourself, or think about every boulder on the way; but there are destinations you can&#x27;t go, overcrowded trains slowing down the journey, hefty ticket prices, and instead of enjoying the freedom, you&#x27;re degraded to a passive passenger.

&gt; there’s no compelling argument as to why that is the case.I&#x27;m not sure that&#x27;s true. We&#x27;ve actually seen several open source projects that were vibe coded literally fold up and disappear because they ran into issues that the AI couldn&#x27;t solve and no one understood them well enough to solve.There&#x27;s a reason openai&#x2F;anthropic and friends are hiring shitloads of software engineers. You still need people that can understand and fix things when the AI goes off hte rails, which happens way more often than any of those companies would like to admit. Sure, &quot;fixing things&quot; often involves having the AI correct itself, but you still have to understand the system enough to know how&#x2F;when to do that.

This doesn’t constitute AI psychosis. His argument is that we need to retain understanding of the systems we use, but there’s no compelling argument as to why that is the case. (I get that people are going to be offended by that statement, but agents are already better than the average software engineer. I don’t see why we need to fight this, except for economic insecurity caused by mass layoffs.)It all just feels like horse drawn carriage operators trying to convince automobile drivers to stop driving.

who is the Starbuck of AI?plot twist: it&#x27;s Starbuck

Or Mr Krabs&#x27; fear of robot overloads keeping technology at bay in the Krusty Krab!

Literally the plot of Battlestar Galactica! Life imitates art indeed...

Ah so it&#x27;s like 2000 again. Germany will go even farther behind it seems

Actually, I have been wondering to which extend the AI craze has reached the DACH region. I don&#x27;t work for any company and neither do my friends. HN is essentially my only peephole into the world of commercial software development and I&#x27;m aware that it&#x27;s extremely biased towards Big Tech and SV startup culture.

yes, I was never so happy to work in Germany. People used to joke about the proverbial fax machine still being a thing but I&#x27;ve never been so glad to work in a culture where this mania doesn&#x27;t exist. Reading HN is like entering Alice&#x27;s Wonderland of token maxxers and AI psychotics. Genuinely don&#x27;t know a single person here who is forced to work like this.

It is absolutely going to be a competitive advantage if it isn&#x27;t already. When your competitors&#x27; products suck because they are using LLMs to write them, and yours work because you aren&#x27;t, customers notice.

Risk aversion is a tradeoff, not always a weakness.

No offense, but if you think your using AI in the development and design of your site, voxos.ai , gave you a competitive advantage it didn&#x27;t. I can instantly tell when someone used an LLM to build their whole site and lets just say... Its not a good thing.

That has probably been an advantage since the move of everything into the web.

do you mean this aesthetically or quantitatively? Are they actually outcompeting &#x2F; making more money ? Or do you mean they are now looking more desirable because their competitors are racing to the bottom (though likely making money on the way down)

My very large employer has always been glacially slow on modernization and tech adoption. It may now, oddly enough, become a competitive advantage.

Reading more, it seems part of his point is “if you’re making these primitives, it’s up to adopters to deploy, so mean-time-to-recovery isn’t that relevant.” Which is valid I guess.But equally, like, do people need Terraform if they can just tell codex “put it live”, and does that hurt to see?

Honestly, I don&#x27;t get this argument. In my opinion, &quot;a collection of thoughtful primitives for others to extend&quot; is more valuable now, not less. From LLM assisted engineering standpoint a nicely put reusable box with thoughtful interface is an easy win, more so if it is also easily extensible.

Mitchell aches because his career has been solving broadly scoped problems by building a collection of thoughtful primitives for others to extend.  LLMs seem to do the opposite but at great speed, and it hurts to watch.

&gt; The answer I got is &quot;It&#x27;s game theory. Someone will do it, and you&#x27;ll be forced to do it, too. It can&#x27;t be that bad&quot;.Oof. Potential &quot;bad&quot; outcomes of &quot;game theory&quot; should be calibrated to include all the bloody wars and genocides throughout recorded history.Why did the Foi-ites kill every man, woman and child of the conquered Bar-ite city? Because if they didn&#x27;t, then they&#x27;d be at a disadvantage if the Bar-ites didn&#x27;t reciprocate in the cities they conquered...

An interesting ethical framework, your friend has.

&gt; It&#x27;s game theory. Someone will do it, and you&#x27;ll be forced to do it, too.You&#x27;ll be forced to do it, or lose. The unstated assumptions are that, first, it will work, and second, that you can&#x27;t afford to lose. But let&#x27;s just assume those for the sake of argument.&gt; It can&#x27;t be that badThat does not follow at all. It can in fact be that bad. That was what made the game theory of MAD different from the game theory of most other things.

I was talking with a friend in the early days of AI boom. I argued that over-reliance in AI will create all kinds of catastrophes.The answer I got is &quot;It&#x27;s game theory. Someone will do it, and you&#x27;ll be forced to do it, too. It can&#x27;t be that bad&quot;.I mean, yes, logic is useful, but ignorance of risks? Assuming that moving blazingly fast and pulverizing things will result in good eventually?This AI thing is not progressing well. I don&#x27;t like this.

Yeah: If the tools aren&#x27;t good enough and fast enough to fix the bugs before release, what makes anyone think they&#x27;ll be able to so easily catch up afterwards?Maybe they&#x27;re assuming that doubling the code-base&#x2F;features is more beneficial versus the damage from doubling the number of bugs... Well, at least for this quarter&#x27;s news to investors...

If they’re so fast why not fix the bugs real quick before shipping

Oh, well, if it makes you money right now, it couldn&#x27;t possibly be wrong or detrimental long term.  Glad we settled that debate.

the reality is my business continues to operate at higher efficiency, even with the bugs.i don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s &#x27;our side&#x27; that has the psychosis.

Yeah how do they know the fix doesn&#x27;t have a bug and it will just keep deploying mire crap. What is the feedback loop, the customer?

Which is super fun as a user because every day something doesn’t work and it’s a different something than yesterday.

Pretty sure I&#x27;ve seen references to AI-only review already happening...

My prediction is that in the next year, we’ll start to see some dismantling of code review at some companies. It might take the form of “AI-only review,” or something similar, but many companies are getting frustrated with developers saying “no” to immediately merging slop they can barely understand.

their ai must have missed that part of the post when it summarized to 3 bullet points

This post calls out how you can&#x27;t argue with these people because they say its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can&#x27;t do!&quot;the top reply is from someone doing exactly that, arguing &quot;but the agents are so fast!&quot;

I&#x27;m guessing you&#x27;ve never heard of Hashicorp (Terraform, Vault) then? Mitchell == Hashicorp.

I have a ton of respect for Mitchell - I didn&#x27;t really know who he was until Ghostty but his writings and viewpoints on AI seem really grounded and make the most sense to me. Including this one.Many people on this forum are suffering under this same psychosis.

I agree, and I&#x27;d like to point out that this problem isn&#x27;t unique to AI driven projects. I think much, if not all, of what Mitchell has been observing can readily happen without AI in the mix.

Just let AI filter out the fake reports! Then let AI work on the real ones. See, there&#x27;s really no problem &quot;more AI&quot; can&#x27;t solve (as long as you&#x27;re willing to ignore all of the underlying ones). &quot;Pay us to create the problems you&#x27;ll have to pay us to fix for you&quot; is one hell of a business model. It basically prints money.

Add this the real possibility that significant part of reports that get filed might be AI generated or rewritten. With high possibility of being misreported because of that. Or have incorrect parts... So attack on multiple sides.And we do not get even get into potential adversarial tactics. If you have no morals what is better than using agents to flood your competitor with fake bug reports.

Just let AI report the bugs. Problem solved!

TBF I&#x27;ve had that experience before AI.I think it was just text templates being used by some support staff.

The last three times I filed detailed bug reports as a client, all I got back were AI replies asking the same questions I’d already answered in the original report and suggesting alternatives I’d explicitly said I’d already tried. No wonder people don’t write bug reports anymore.

oh i’ve definitely seen “we’re going to track the number of bugs created in jira per team” turn into “people just file things as tasks instead of bugs” or “only easy things are filed as bugs and completed right away”. It’s trivially gameable.

Bug reports also go down when people lose faith that they will be fixed, because reporting them is often a substantial time commitment. You see it happen pretty regularly as trust in a group&#x2F;company collapses.

That&#x27;s a study. I can link you studies that say violent video games cause aggression, that porn causes rape, etc. Studies are products of the biases of the researchers.

It is<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;psychiatryonline.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.1176&#x2F;appi.pn.2025.10.10.5" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;psychiatryonline.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.1176&#x2F;appi.pn.2025.10.10....</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.yahoo.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;applied-pope-losing-grip-reality-020218030.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.yahoo.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;applied-pope-losing-grip...</a>

Yes, no. Yes, they want to make money. No, addiction is physical compulsion and nothing else. Despite the effort to redefine that term to cover all kinds of things, an app is not equal to heroin.

Do you believe that an AI can write persuasive text? Do you believe that an AI can be trained to elicit a specific user reaction?* Can we agree that AI companies are strongly incentivized to make money, and they can do so by making their systems addictive? Because AI psychosis can be a byproduct of that.*Il outline how briefly: mutate the model 500 times, give 1&#x2F;500 of your user base a mutated version of the model, and save the top 5 of these model, ranked by how often the users did something, over the course of a week. Repeat for a year, passing the top 1% of these models onto the next round. This is the simplest way to do this and I can think of better ways to do this. I don&#x27;t even work on this sorta thing; its 100% obvious to the AI labs how to do this better

I do not believe &#x27;AI psychosis&#x27; is an actual thing.

I&#x27;m not convinced. There&#x27;s a ton of cost to adopting a radically different workflow.

Deprecating immature workflows (LLM agents in this case) is much simpler and faster than building them from scratch. Many companies get this risk assessment right. The case where being wrong is much more costly than being right.

If you feel this way, you might like my new CLI tool, Burn, Baby, Burn (those tokens) (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dtnewman&#x2F;burn-baby-burn&#x2F;tree&#x2F;main" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dtnewman&#x2F;burn-baby-burn&#x2F;tree&#x2F;main</a>).Show HN here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=48151287">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=48151287</a>

More like how do you know when your charming partner is a catfish. Maybe 2 years and when you are living in a friends basement.

The only way many people learn that the stove is hot is by burning their hands on it.Let them.

It’s almost as if we haven’t learned anything from Hans the horse, Ouija boards, &quot;facilitated communication&quot;, or the countless examples of the folly of surrounding yourself with yes men. The point about improv is spot on.

&gt; companies and people outsourcing their decision making and thinking to AIIt&#x27;s so interesting how easy it is to steer the LLM&#x27;s based on context to arriving at whatever conclusion you engineer out of it. They really are like improv actors, and the first rule of improv is &quot;yes, and&quot;.So part of the psychosis is when these people unknowingly steer their LLM into their own conclusions and biases, and then they get magnified and solidified. It&#x27;s gonna end in disaster.

He uses AI himself, so I agree he doesn&#x27;t see AI use as black&#x2F;white.Hard agree about ideas, thinking, advice. AI&#x27;s sycophancy is a huge subtle problem. I&#x27;ve tried my best to create a system prompt to guard against this w&#x2F; Opus 4.7. It doesn&#x27;t adhere to it 100% of the time and the longer the conversation goes, the worse the sycophancy gets (because the system instructions become weaker and weaker). I have to actively look for and guard against sycophancy whenever I chat w&#x2F; Opus 4.7.

I thinking that it’s quite a different experience going all Jackson Pollock with AI in your own studio on your own terms, compared to the sorry state of affairs of having 100s of Pollocks throwing paint around wildly within a corp to meet a paint quota.

Hi Mitchell. Psychosis is a serious psychiatric condition that can be induced or triggered by AI. “AI psychosis” in this context is a misuse of a clinical term. Your tweet describes a disagreement on a value judgment that boils down to “move fast and break things” with high trust in AI outputs vs going all in on quality and reliability with low trust in AI. It’s an engineering tradeoff like any other.Claiming that the people who disagree with you must be experiencing a form of psychosis, experiencing actual hallucinations and unable to tell what is real, is a weak ad hominem that comes off no better than calling them retarded or schizophrenic.If you genuinely think one of your friends is going through a psychotic episode, you should be trying to get to them professional help. But don’t assume you can diagnose a human psyche just because you can diagnose a software bug.

I’ve had to do a ton of SQL stuff lately, which I haven’t really worked with since the late 90s. ChatGPT has been a godsend, not just for me, but for our only coworker who knows SQL well, whom I’d probably be bugging several times a day at my wits’ end.But no one cares about those kinds of productivity gains. Just the ones that will completely replace us.

&gt; outsourcing their decision making and thinking to AI and not really about using AI itself&gt; I use AI a ton and I&#x27;m having more fun every day than I ever did beforeWith respect, this is what makes me worry.If someone is a user of AI, can they really tell the difference between &quot;outsourcing&quot; and &quot;using&quot;? I worry that a lot of people will start out well-intentioned and end up completely outsourced before they realise it.

It’s really frustrating too because even just the plain language translation and pattern matching aspects have such incredible uses.As a cybersecurity IR professional being able to have a constantly logging counterpart who’s also able to go run queries and check logs on its own is an incredible speed boost.I can just throw it a finding and have it slot it into a timeline and make notes.I can toss it something mildly interesting to chase down while I focus on the obvious activity.So many things that don’t involve having it “think” for you and keep you in the front seat.But all of that is constantly overshadowed by these companies pushing the automation or “reasoning” aspects more and more and the sycophants who screech that it’s perfect and can do no wrong when every serious users experience is that “yes, it definitely can, often to catastrophic effect”.

The worst part of AI is that the time to produce software has become entirely unpredictable. &quot;If Claude is randomly good at this, and happens to be up today, it will take me about 3 hours. If Claude is randomly bad at this task, or has downtime, 2 weeks&quot;

Correct. I use AI a ton and I&#x27;m having more fun every day than I ever did before thanks to it (on average, highs are higher, lows are lower). Your characterization is all very accurate. Thank you.Here&#x27;s some other topics I&#x27;ve written on it:- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mitchellh.com&#x2F;writing&#x2F;my-ai-adoption-journey" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mitchellh.com&#x2F;writing&#x2F;my-ai-adoption-journey</a>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mitchellh.com&#x2F;writing&#x2F;building-block-economy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mitchellh.com&#x2F;writing&#x2F;building-block-economy</a>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mitchellh.com&#x2F;writing&#x2F;simdutf-no-libcxx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mitchellh.com&#x2F;writing&#x2F;simdutf-no-libcxx</a> (complex change thanks to AI, shows how I approach it rationally)

&gt; friends I’ve had who have done things like have a full on mourning session when a model updates because they lost a friend&#x2F;loverI mean, isn&#x27;t that the natural and expected response? An AI company sold them a relationship with a chatbot and at least some their social&#x2F;romantic needs were being met by that product. When what they were paying for was taken from them and changed without warning into something that no longer filled that void in their life why wouldn&#x27;t 
they morn that loss?The fact that they were hurt by that sudden loss is totally healthy. It&#x27;s just part of moving on. The real problem was getting into an unhealthy relationship with a fictitious partner under the control of an abusive company willing to exploit their loneliness in exchange for money.Hopefully they now know better, but people (especially desperate ones) make poor choices all the time to get what&#x27;s missing in their lives or to distract themselves from it.

I&#x27;m curious how to best define what AI psychosis actually is.My understanding is that regular psychosis involves someone taking bits and pieces of facts or real world events and chaining them into a logical order or interpolating meanings or explanations which feel real and obvious to the patient but are not sufficiently backed by evidence and thus not in line with our widely accepted understanding of reality.AI psychosis is then this same phenomenon occurring at a more widespread scale due to the next-word-prediction nature of LLMs facilitating this by lowering the activation energy for this to happen. LLMs are excellent at taking any idea, question, theory and spinning a linear and plausibly coherent line of conversation from it.

I&#x27;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 didn’t think just offloading your thinking to AI was AI psychosis.To me AI psychosis is the handful of friends I’ve had who have done things like have a full on mourning session when a model updates because they lost a friend&#x2F;lover, the one guy who won’t speak to his family directly but has them talk to ChatGPT first and then has ChatGPT generate his response, or the two who are confident that they have discovered that physics and mathematics are incorrect and have discovered the truth of reality through their conversations with the models.But language is a shared technology so maybe the term is being used for less egregious behavior than I was using it for.

It’s simpler than that - it’s a guessing machine that has superior access to a whole load of information and capacity to process at a speed at which we humans cannot compete.Does it make it better than us? No because ultimately the thing itself doesn’t ‘know’ right from wrong.

Yeah, very often the issue is that some context is missing. It&#x27;ll say something true, but which misses the bigger point, or leads to a suboptimal result. Or it interprets an ambiguous thing in one specific way, when the other meaning makes more sense. You have to keep your wits about you to catch these things.It&#x27;s an incredible tool but it&#x27;s also very derpy sometimes, full of biases, blind spots etc.

The way I phrase this to others is: Language models produce linguistically valid sentences, not factually correct sentences.

&gt; which is arguably more challenging than creating the solution.This hasn&#x27;t been the case in my experience. Devising a correct solution without a definition of the problem is impossible because you wouldn&#x27;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!

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.

&gt; Is &quot;AI said it was a good idea&quot; and worse than &quot;we were following industry trends&quot;?Based on the stuff I&#x27;ve seen, yes it seems a lot worse.

this author suggest its essentially the same risk <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.poppastring.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;what-we-lost-the-last-time-code-got-cheap" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.poppastring.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;what-we-lost-the-last-time-...</a>. i feel its heightened because execs and leaders are absolutely salivating over the opportunity to fire thousands of humans with no regard for the cognitive debt that comes from outsourcing thinking to ai.

I wonder how different this is from having companies let Fortune or Inc magazine do their thinking for them.Or random consultants.Is &quot;AI said it was a good idea&quot; and worse than &quot;we were following industry trends&quot;?

I digress; this article actually has helped identify useful knowledge gaps around topics I have researched. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;drensin.medium.com&#x2F;elephants-goldfish-and-the-new-golden-age-of-software-engineering-c33641a48874" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;drensin.medium.com&#x2F;elephants-goldfish-and-the-new-go...</a>While you have to think about things objectively no matter what, when I start researching topics like physics, using AI as suggested in that article has proven very useful.

I wouldn’t say they have an undefined truth value. Their source of truth is their training data. The problem is that human text is not tightly coupled to the capital T truth.

“Toked out” is really, really good, thank you for this

&gt; if you just prompt the AI and believe what it tell you then you have AI psychosisThis is the right definition. LLM outputs have undefined truth value. They’re mechanized Frankfurtian Bullshiters. Which can be valuable! If you have the tools or taste to filter the things that happen to be true from the rest of the dross.However! We need a nicer word for it. Suggesting someone has “AI psychosis” feels a bit too impolitic.Maybe we reclaim “toked out” from our misspent youths?e.g. “This piece feels a little toked out. Let’s verify a few of Claude’s claims”

I suspect we&#x27;re going to see this in many corporate environments soon, if we aren&#x27;t already&gt; your coworkers who disagree with it, but those people are going to leave or be fired.Personally I expect that I will be this person soon, probably fired. I&#x27;m not sure what I will do for a career after, but I sure do hate AI companies now for doing this to my career

this is exactly what is happening. instead of building true AI culture around thoughtful adoption of AI strengths while defending against weaknesses, they&#x27;re coming up with bullshit heuristics like &quot;every repo has a CLAUDE.md&quot;, watching private token usage dashboards, and terrorizing everyone into doing it (or lose your job).this leads to naive AI adoption, which is the worst of both worlds (no real speedup, out sourcing thinking, ai slop PRs, skill rot).

I have a friend that is a junior in a security-oriented sys-admin&#x2F;network engineer type role. They have been doing the job for only a bit over a year. No background in programming.Their entire organization has been handed Codex&#x2F;Claude and told to &quot;go all in on AI&quot; and &quot;automate everything&quot;. So the mandate is for people that do not know how to code and have the keys to the castle to unleash these things upon their systems.This is at a large organization with tens of thousands of employees.I am waiting with bated breath for the ultimate outcome!

Several people I know have already gone through phases like this. When you&#x27;re doing it alone there is a moderating factor when their friends and family start calling them out on their behavior or weird things they say.I can&#x27;t imagine how bad it would be if your employer started doing this from the leadership. You&#x27;d be pressured to get on board or fear getting fired. Nobody would be trying to moderate your thinking except your coworkers who disagree with it, but those people are going to leave or be fired. If you want to keep your job, you have to play along.

LLMs are good at producing code that seems plausible at first glance and appears to work, but it never really does. And when trying to fix things, you discover 7 slightly different ad hoc implementations of the same thing, with their own weird edge cases and behaviors. And you likely miss 4 more. There is no intention or coherence behind any of it.

I agree with you, except it isn&#x27;t even good at writing code. Almost every time that you get an LLM to write a bunch of code for you, it has mistakes in it. The logic isn&#x27;t right, the API calls aren&#x27;t right, the syntax isn&#x27;t right (!). That problem hasn&#x27;t yet been fixed and it looks as though it never will be. That means that every line of code it generates, you have to review, because even if 95% of the code is correct, you need to find the 5% which isn&#x27;t. But if you have to do that, it becomes slower than just writing the code yourself. As people have pointed out over and over again: typing in the code was never the part that took time. So I don&#x27;t agree that LLMs are really useful for writing code.

&gt; 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 twitterI&#x27;m seeing it with lawyers, too. Like, about law. (Just not in their subject matter.) To the point that I had a lawyer using Perplexity to disagree with actual legal advice I got from a subject-matter expert.

&gt; find ways to let the agent make the boring decisions, like how to loop over some array, or how to adapt the output of one call into the input of another.Those kind of advice ultimately don&#x27;t matter. If you&#x27;re familiar with a programming project, you&#x27;ll also be familiar with the constructs and API so looping over an array or mapping some data is obvious. Just like you needn&#x27;t read to a dictionary to write &quot;Thank you&quot;, you just write it.And if you&#x27;re not, ultimately you need to verify the doc for the contract of some function or the lifecycle of some object to have any guaranty that the software will do what you want to do. And after a few day of doing that, you&#x27;ll then be familiar with the constructs.&gt; make the real decisions ahead of time. encode them into specs. define boundaries, apis, key data structures. identify systems and responsibilities. explicitly enumerate error handling. set hard constraints around security and PII.The only way to do that is if you have implemented the algorithm before and now are redoing for some reason (instead of using the previous project). If you compare nice specs like the ietf RFCs and the USB standards and their implementation in OS like FreeBSD, you will see that implementation has often no resemblance to how it&#x27;s described. The spec is important, but getting a consistent implementation based on it is hard work too.That consistency is hard to get right without getting involved in the details. Because it&#x27;s ultimately about fine grained control.If there&#x27;s one thing I know about users is that they&#x27;re never certain about whatever they&#x27;ve produced.

Can concur. I would say I am doing 3 things per day now instead of 1.

when you outsource thinking to AI, you get that magical speed up. the agent is making decisions for you, so things move at agent speed. it often makes decisions without telling you, and the final &quot;here&#x27;s the plan&quot; output often requires you to understand the problem at great depth, which requires return to human speed, so you skim and just approve.the trick is to be mindful, aware, and deliberate about what decisions are being outsourced. this requires slowing down, losing that absurd 10x vibe coding gain. in exchange, youre more &quot;in-the-loop&quot; and accumulate less cognitive debt.find ways to let the agent make the boring decisions, like how to loop over some array, or how to adapt the output of one call into the input of another.make the real decisions ahead of time. encode them into specs. define boundaries, apis, key data structures. identify systems and responsibilities. explicitly enumerate error handling. set hard constraints around security and PII.tell the agent to halt on ambiguity.a good engineer will get a 2x or 3x speedup without the downsides.

I think the author means that we as homosapiens cant stop talking about this new shinny hammer we just invited

I am starting to come around to a similar sentiment. I have seen several large projects cook now for almost a year are not done. These are not trivial projects but the leads are heavily using ai at every opportunity.I wasnt before but I am 100% confident that AI has done nothing to speed the delivery. It hasnt slowed it down either. It is a wash. The job is more miserable though.

Ai gives generic answer for ideas but it&#x27;s great for code. Pattern matching works for one not the other.

&gt; Probably they copy and paste my reply to their bots.You must not give in to the temptation to mention pirate talk, Klingon, or goblins.But now that I&#x27;ve put the seed in your mind, you probably (hopefully) will. :)

I&#x27;ve heard the same thing mentioned by a close friend building integrations. They are helping&#x2F;supporting real use cases but they decided not to help vibe coder founders without an understanding of how APIs work etc. It&#x27;s just too big of a gap to cover even for larger companies with strong support.

Seeing this too. Customer support tickets are all AI now. The random bolded words, the em dashes, they way where if you KNOW what is actually happening, they are slightly off or just WAY off.

If you were tapped into AI first features you&#x27;d design aliases in your api so AI hallucinated api exists for next time

Create a &lt;domain&gt;.tld&#x2F;llms.txt or some SKILL.md files. When I encounter these tickets I just share links to these resources and the problem goes away.

That&#x27;s why I made an API LLMs can call to search fastcomments APIs: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.fastcomments.com&#x2F;guide-llm-kit.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.fastcomments.com&#x2F;guide-llm-kit.html</a>

What I&#x27;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&#x27;t exist at all. I&#x27;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 technical competence of understanding the API doc on Postman. That is understandable. Unfortunately they don&#x27;t even have the competence of pointing their AI to Postman in the right way. My custumer assessed that they will always find a way to do a mistake despite any mitigation from our side. What I do is replying to those tickets with line by line comments of the allucinated JSON. I never talk about AIs because I might hurt the pride of some of them and, who knows, some little mistakes could be from real junior developers. Sometimes the tickets are followed up by more puzzled ones, sometimes they fix the problem. Probably they copy and paste my reply to their bots.

&gt; Do you believe what teachers told you in school? Yes?Nope. At least, not without proof. That would, IMO, be kinda crazy. We could argue semantics - maybe “stupid” would be a better word? Lacking in critical thinking skills? Whatever “it” is, it isn’t good.

There&#x27;s a huge difference between a teacher giving outdated information representing what was once our (or at least their) best understanding of the world, and a chatbot that just randomly makes up things for no reason while insisting that it&#x27;s all true.Also, a good teacher should be encouraging the development of critical thinking skills and correcting your errors, while AI will just tell you how brilliant you are when you wrongly tell it about how you&#x27;ve just invented a new form of math or disproved a scientific theory you barely understand in the first place.Not all BS is the same, just as not all sources are equally unreliable.

&gt;but if you just prompt the AI and believe what it tell you then you have AI psychosis.No it isn&#x27;t. Do you believe what teachers told you in school? Yes? Well, I guess you&#x27;re suffering from just normal psychosis!I don&#x27;t understand how people don&#x27;t understand that people offer unreliable information too. We learned about the tongue map in school as kids - many kids still learn that in school today. It&#x27;s still BS regardless whether it was told to you by a teacher or AI.You don&#x27;t suffer from psychosis for believing a source of information, you&#x27;re simply mistaken. You need a more critical eye to assess what you&#x27;re told in general, not just AI.

What does &#x27;prefer&#x27; mean here?I would say writing it myself is more enjoyable (in some cases). But I quite understand that I am not paid to enjoy myself. I&#x27;d say it&#x27;s quicker getting AI to do it and reviewing. I believe the outcome is no worse on average. So yes, that&#x27;s my chosen approach.

If you think you can let AI write code without double checking you have AI psychosis.If you prefer reviewing AI-written code over writing it yourself, you just have odd preferences from my perspective (but not psychosis).

I&#x27;ve been strictly using LLM&#x27;s to either push stuff that I&#x27;ve done plenty times before and are mostly boilerplate or have zero value for writing them by hand (not even educational), and I always ENSURE that they work on stuff that are easily verifiable and proven incorrect with my existing knowledge or a few minutes of googling.

What is &quot;thinking&quot;?LLMs can do advanced math and coding, which involves logic, so they are definitely capable of using logic. Which is what most people call reasoning.So &quot;LLMs are incapable of reasoning, they are just pattern matchers&quot; is wrong. A lot of logic _is_ pattern matching, BTW. Like, syllogisms - deductive reasoning - do you think LLMs are incapable of that?The thing you&#x27;re referring to is that LLMs are trained to produce an answer which a human would like, i.e. they aim to produce plausible rather than correct answers.So it&#x27;s not so much a mental deficit as a different goal. Trusting LLM blindly is definitely dangerous, but dismissing it as useless for anything by code is rather wrong.Pattern matching is hardly what distinguishes human from LLM - if you ask somebody a question about policy, for examples, chances are they&#x27;d just recite something they heard somewhere, never really thinking about it from first principles.

I’ve been talking to a lot of engineers about how they use AI in their day to day and it’s dramatically different than what you see from the hypers.The vast majority use one agent at a time and careful step through code. The main benefit they report is often about researching the codebase and possible solutions.

Aren&#x27;t we ignoring the elephant in the room ?Garry Tan has been the primary crusader for AI driven decision making. I&#x27;m sure his position is more nuanced, but his twitter driven communication makes him appear like a caricature of a man in AI psychosis.When the head of YC champions AI driven decision making, companies will inevitably be influenced into doing exactly that. It&#x27;s unfortunate, because AI is generational technology and the hyperbole distracts from the real sea change occuring in labor markets everywhere.

&gt; I don&#x27;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.Today&#x27;s frontier models are genuinely useful as rubber ducks or grunt units. They are horrible for actual problem solving. These tools are not capable of actual reasoning. They will happily crap out a broken, untyped, untested Next.js monstrosity with no discernible architecture. They will build esoteric shell scripts to perform operations that could be done idiomatically and simply with tools already in your codebase. They will tell you to walk to the car wash then have the car wash valet your car back to you when confronted with the flaw in their logic. They will validate incorrect beliefs like ketchup being an acceptable hot dog condiment or the notion that &quot;The Red Hot Chili Peppers&quot; make good music. They have no taste, no anima, no drive.Rule #1: Do not anthropomorphize the LLM. It is a million monkeys at a million typewriters piped into a digital sieve. I don&#x27;t know how or why people place such trust in them while bemoaning other technology in our lives for being so broken (&quot;my algorithm [sic] only shows me X&quot;, &quot;the new iPhone update sucks&quot;, etc). If everybody followed this rule then the deluge of emoji-ridden hokum pouring into Slack workspaces and GitHub PRs around the world would cease but I&#x27;m not holding my breath.

Part of the psychosis are AI usage mandates, where companies require a certain amount of LLM usage per worker. Of course these things are useful, but forcing them on workers is psychotic.

I&#x27;m pretty sure he&#x27;s talking about companies and people outsourcing their decision making and thinking to AI and not really about using AI itself.I don&#x27;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 thinking and reasoning about the topic instead of just doing a little bit of thinking themselves.These things are dog shit when it comes to ideas, thinking, or providing advice because they are pattern matchers they are just going to give you the pattern they see. Most people see this if you just try to talk to it about an idea. They often just spit out the most generic dog shit.This however it pretty useful for certain tasks were pattern matching is actually beneficial like writing code, but again you just can&#x27;t let it do the thinking and decision making.

When I note some strange money flow I just assume embazzlement or money laundering.

Mitchellh is on to something. Some of the AI products I&#x27;ve seen seem like psychosis hallucinatory fever dreams, using terms and concepts that have no meaning. Funding? $50,000,000 pre-seed.

while I find myself agreeing with the posted tweet, I don&#x27;t disagree that we need to communicate about things we disagree about better. Take my upvote

This is a critical communications issue that is becoming what I believe the defining characteristic of &quot;This Age&quot;: nobody knows how to discuss disagreement, and because it cannot even be discussed communication ends, followed by blind obedience, forced bullying, retreat and abandonment. This is going to be a hell of a ride, because nobody can really discuss the situation with a rational tone.

&gt; I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s super clear what we&#x27;ll find outI think some companies will find out that their senior engineers were providing more value and software stability than they gave them credit for!Corporate feedback loops are very slow though, partly because management don&#x27;t like to admit mistakes, and partly because of false success reporting up the chain. I&#x27;d not be surprised if it takes 5 years or more before there is any recognition of harm being done by AI, and quiet reversion to practices that worked better.

We&#x27;re definitely in the mess around phase of AI adoption.I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s super clear what we&#x27;ll find out.We&#x27;ve all built the moat of our careers out of our expertise.It is also very possible that expertise will be rendered significantly less valuable as the models improve.Nobody ever cared what the code looked like. They only ever cared if it solved their problem and it was bug free. Maybe everything falls apart, or maybe AI agents ship code that&#x27;s good enough.Given the state of the industry were clearly going to find out one way or the other, hah!

It&#x27;s really inconsistent though.. it takes shortcuts and leaves todos all the time without really calling it out explicitly, you have to pay close attention.

&gt; I use AI coding tools every day, but AI tools have no concept of the future.
The selfish thinking that an engineer has when they think &quot;If this breaks in prod, I won&#x27;t be able to fix it. And they&#x27;ll page me at 3AM&quot; we&#x27;ve relied on to build stable systems.Maybe it&#x27;s just my prompt or something but my coding agent (Opus 4.7 based) says things like &quot;this is the kind of thing that will blow up at 2am six months from now&quot; all the time.

The AI psychosis is not the anti-opinion to the use of AI.I use AI coding tools every day, but AI tools have no concept of the future.The selfish thinking that an engineer has when they think &quot;If this breaks in prod, I won&#x27;t be able to fix it. And they&#x27;ll page me at 3AM&quot; we&#x27;ve relied on to build stable systems.The general laziness of looking for a perfect library on CPAN so that I don&#x27;t have to do this work (often taking longer to not find a library than writing it by hand).Have written thousands of lines of code with AI tool which ended up in prod and mostly it feels natural, because since 2017 I&#x27;ve been telling people to write code instead of typing it all on my own &amp; setting up pitfalls to catch bad code in testing.But one thing it doesn&#x27;t do is &quot;write less code&quot;[1].[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xcancel.com&#x2F;t3rmin4t0r&#x2F;status&#x2F;2019277780517781522&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xcancel.com&#x2F;t3rmin4t0r&#x2F;status&#x2F;2019277780517781522&#x2F;</a>

HN needs to start sticking an ?mx=1 on the end

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41173763">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41173763</a>

Why do you all still submit twitter.com links when that domain does not even work?

I don&#x27;t doubt there are companies totally misusing coding agents and LLMs in production. There are also real companies with real revenue and solid architecture using LLMs to deliver products. There are also companies with real revenue and rapidly accumulating tech debt.Eventually the companies that can&#x27;t cope with undisciplined engineering will succumb to unacceptable reliability and be outcompeted, just like in the &quot;move fast and break things&quot; era.

&quot;Just use autoresearch and it will fix your app&#x27;s memory leaks in an hour&quot; is what I was nonchalantly told by someone who has never written a line of code ever.I guess what I relate to the most is how dismissive people get about real software engineering work.I may have skill issues, but I am yet to reach the level of autonomous engineering people tend to expect out of AI these days.

This will be pushed down from people, who will have no deep understanding of it. But it does check some boxes in an ISO certification.Well, now you must to work with a confusing tool which slows you down. You are not allowed to use claude directly anymore, because someone heard that mythos is really bad for security. But hey, the tool integrates well with Jira!You hate every second working with this thing. All the joy you had with explorative coding is forever gone, which was the sole reason you entered this field.Deep inside you know that you can&#x27;t change your job, because every other employer will cut its workforce as AI removes all manual labor of a software engineer and reduces risk to a minimum.Oh, now we can finally move all those jobs to india without risk and shareholders will love it! How awesome is that! Wait, do we still need that guy in cubicle 42, who bitches and moans about AI every day? Nah...

What&#x27;s the matter with spec driven development? It probably carries derisk IP benefits

Totally agree with one shotting GUI tools. I especially have liked it to create a single-file web app, and then open it with Chromium locally (no web server needed).In my case, it built a tool for splitting sounds and a tool for defining hitboxes for a game. Tools made exactly for more workflow. Wild times.

I&#x27;m going through a mixed experience regarding this, personally.Management is really pushing AI. It&#x27;s obnoxious, and their idea on how it fits into my team&#x27;s job specifically is completely, hilariously detached from reality. On the off chance someone says something reasonable, unless it fits the mold, it&#x27;s immediately discarded. The mold being &quot;spec driven development&quot;. We&#x27;re not even a product team for crying out loud. I straight up started skipping these meetings for the sake of my sanity. It&#x27;s mindwash, and it&#x27;s genuinely dizzying. The other reason I stopped attending is because it ironically makes me more disinterested in AI, which I consider to be against my personal interests on the long run overall.On the flipside, I love using Claude (in moderation). It keeps pulling off several very nice things, some of which Mitchell touched on in this post (the last one):- I write scripts and automation from time to time; Claude fleshes them out way better with way more safety features, feature flags, and logging than I&#x27;d otherwise have capacity to spend time on- Claude catches missed refactors and preexisting defects, and does a generally solid pass checking for defects as a whole- Claude routinely helps with doing things I&#x27;d basically never be able to justify spending time on. Yesterday, I one-shotted an entire utility application with a GUI to boot, and it worked first try; I was beyond impressed.- Claude helped me and a colleague do some partisan cross-team investigation in secret. We&#x27;re migrating &lt;thing&gt; and we were evaluating &lt;differences&gt;. There was a lot of them. Management was in a limbo, unsure what to do, flip-flopping between bad options. In a desperate moment, I figured, hey, we kinda have a thing now for investigating an inhuman amount of stuff in detail - so I&#x27;ve put together a care package for my colleague with all our code, a bunch of context, a capture of all the input data for the past one week, and all the logs generated. Colleague put his team&#x27;s side of the story next to it, and with the help of Claude, did some extremely nice cross-functional investigation. Over the course of a few weeks, he was able to confirm like a dozen showstopper bugs, many of which would have been absolutely fiendish if not impossible to fix (or even catch) if we went live without knowing about them. One even culminated in a whole-ass solution re-architecturing. We essentially tore down a silo wall with Claude&#x27;s help in doing this.So ultimately, it really is a mixed bag, with some really deep lowpoints and some really nice higlights. I also just generally find it weird that a technical tool [category] is being pushed down people&#x27;s throats with a technical reasoning, but by management. One would think this goes bottom up, or is at least a lot more exploratory. The frenzy is real.

You just have to wish for the rest of the monkey.

Welcome to the club, Mitchell! Pizza&#x27;s to the right.In all seriousness...well, yeah. AI is a monkey&#x27;s paw, and that&#x27;s how monkey paws work. So many movies and books warned us!

Sounds pretty accurate. Bunch of comments on this thread sound like AI is some kind of a new doomsday cult. The most annoying thing I find personally is that all engineering principles are getting crushed by non techies. Management counting token usage, forcing agent use, reducing headcount in the name of productivity gain. Devs building bridges but nobody knows what the bridge is, what are the standards to which it was built, how it works and how to maintain it. VCs counting extra money claiming chasing the holy profit is the future. The abundance of engineering apathy is disturbing.

It&#x27;s kind of like producing code is becoming more like farming.We didn&#x27;t create the dna we rely on to produce food and lumber, we just set up the conditions and hope the process produces something we want instead of deleting all the bannannas.Farming is a fine an honorable and valuable function for society, but I have no interest in being a farmer. I build things, I don&#x27;t plant seeds and pray to the gods and hope they grow into something I want.

The origin of &#x27;dark DNA&#x27; begins to make more sense through this sort of lens, except the system somehow maintained a level of compensation to fix all its flaws.

Humans who have been writing systems like that for many years know how to maintain and modify them successfully.  It’s just that our industry has a bias towards youth who don’t think they have anything to learn from those who came before them.

it&#x27;s been 10y and i still haven&#x27;t seen a human system that badmaybe some that people said were that bad. but they just needed some elbow grease. remember, it takes guts to be amazing!

&gt; 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 more defects than they close and the whole system will be unstable.Wow, it’s true, AI really is set to match human performance on large, complex software systems! ;)

However Michael Crichton imagined it would.

Reminds me of the quote in the original Westworld movie:“ These are highly complicated pieces of equipment… almost as complicated as living organisms.In some cases, they’ve been designed by other computers.We don’t know exactly how they work.”Now how did that work out ;-)

How could anyone answer that with any level of certainty?

Frankly this is what everyone is counting on whether they know it or not. The question though is not “will the models get good enough?”. The question is does the repo even contain enough accurate information content to determine what the system is even supposed to be doing.

Are they improving? I thought they were just getting more expensive

People are often skeptical when I say this, but there&#x27;s simply no guarantee that it&#x27;s possible in principle to clean up a bad architecture. If your system is &quot;overfitted&quot; to 10,000 requirements from 1,000 customers, it may be impossible to satisfy requirements 10,001 through 10,100 without starting over from scratch.

How is a newer AI going to &quot;clean up&quot; dropped databases, compromised computers or leaked personal data?(None of above is theoretical)

Someone responded to a previous comment of mine [0] positing a Peter principle [1] of slopcoding — it will always be easier to tack on a new feature than to understand a whole system and clean it up. The equilibrium will remain at the point of near, but not total, codebase incomprehensibility.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=48037128#48038639">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=48037128#48038639</a>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Peter_principle" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Peter_principle</a>

Yes. And as the models get better, it works better. But at one point you do have to understand the code because it&#x27;s also just guessing as to what your actual intentions are.It doesn&#x27;t know what mess you want to clean up. A lot of times AI just starts making up new patterns on top of other patterns and having backwards compatibility between the two. How does it know which one you actually like?

As the models keep improving, wouldn’t you be able to task a newer AI to “clean up this mess”?

What concerns me about this is that as these stories multiply and circulate people will just completely stop buying software&#x2F;SAAS from startups, because 90% or more will be this same thing. It will completely kill the market.

This hospital will learn some hard lessons. I hope their backup strategy is good. I&#x27;m surprised they can field software from an entity that isn&#x27;t SOC2 &amp; HIPAA certified.

Don&#x27;t help him. Let him figure it out by himself, else they (he and hospital) will never learn.

This is going to happen all over. Company I&#x27;m currently contracting with has gone AI everything (aka technical debt hell), and they&#x27;re gonna suffer for it. I&#x27;m glad my consulting contract ends in 2 months. I don&#x27;t want to be around for the crash

Have you tried to talk him out of it, and have you considered blowing the whistle on him? He could kill people!

I hope you have quoted him a very very high hourly rate.

Wow. This is like every other gold rush. Millions will walk into the ice and snow, somehow not questioning that their ability to dig is not unique.

A non-technical friend of mine has just won some hospital contracts after vibecoding w&#x2F; 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&#x2F;state issues.

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 more defects than they close and the whole system will be unstable. It will become a special kind of process to clean room out such a mess and rebuild it fresh (probably still with AI) after distilling out core design principles to avoid catastrophic breakdown.Somewhere in the future, the new software engineering will be primarily about principles to avoid this in the first, place but it will take us 20 years to learn them, just like original software eng took a lot longer than expected to reach a stable set of design principles (and people still argue about them!).

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xcancel.com&#x2F;mitchellh&#x2F;status&#x2F;2055380239711457578" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xcancel.com&#x2F;mitchellh&#x2F;status&#x2F;2055380239711457578</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hachyderm.io&#x2F;@mitchellh&#x2F;116580433508108130" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hachyderm.io&#x2F;@mitchellh&#x2F;116580433508108130</a>

I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis