Discussion summary
Discussions highlight concerns about AI overhype, industry practices, and productivity expectations, with some advocating for regulation and cautious use.
What the discussion says
- AI psychosis may stem from FOMO and lack of best practices.
- Some see AI as a tool for productivity, not replacement.
- Regulation, especially from the EU, is seen as necessary.
- AI is useful for prototyping but not for full product releases.
- Users should be cautious and not over-rely on AI for decision-making.
“The real AI psychosis is the expectation of 5x/10x productivity gains.”
“AI is a tool that reduces the time for ideas to manifest, but not to think for you.”
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- Hacker News
- Hard to have sober talk about this since a lot of discourse is AI psychosis vs. AI naysayers. Does software quality seem to have taken a jump in the past few years to anyone? Not to me, seems to be getting worse. Think that's a decent signal. Can tell you I'm dealing with a non-technical VP who loves blast submitting vibe-coded PRs and while there's some quick wins, overall quality is bad, and we had our first real production outage that Claude one-shot caused but could not one-shot solve.by thr0w
- My very large employer has always been glacially slow on modernization and tech adoption. It may now, oddly enough, become a competitive advantage.by miek
- 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!).
by zmmmmm - I'm going through a mixed experience regarding this, personally.
Management is really pushing AI. It's obnoxious, and their idea on how it fits into my team's job specifically is completely, hilariously detached from reality. On the off chance someone says something reasonable, unless it fits the mold, it's immediately discarded. The mold being "spec driven development". We're not even a product team for crying out loud. I straight up started skipping these meetings for the sake of my sanity. It's mindwash, and it'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'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'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're migrating <thing> and we were evaluating <differences>. 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'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'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'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'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.
by perching_aix - 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.by thisisit
- Maybe this is what will turn software engineering into an Engineering field.
Right know, prompters are setting up whole company infrastructure. I personally know one. He migrated the companies database to a newer Postgres version. He was successful in the end, but I was gnawing my teeth when he described every step of the process.
It sounded like "And then, I poured gasoline on the servers while smoking a cigarette. But don't worry, I found a fire extinguisher in the basement. The gauge says it's empty, but I can still hear some liquid when I shake it..."
If he leaves the company, they will need an even more confident prompter to maintain their DB infrastructure.
by foxfired - I feel in a really weird position where I both really dislike what AI is doing to the experience and practice of writing code, to the point where I want a job doing literally anything else besides using the computer, but also think that these tools are extremely powerful and only getting better.
I think Mitchell's point is well taken -- it's possible for these tools to introduce rotten foundations that will only be found out later when the whole structure collapsed. I don't want to be in the position of being on the hook when that happens and not having the deep understanding of the code base that I used to.
But humans have introduced subtle yet catastrophic bugs into code forever too... A lot of this feels like an open empirical question. Will we see many systems collapse in horrifying ways that they uniquely didn't before? Maybe some, but will we also not learn that we need to shift more to specification and validation? Idk, it just seems to me like this style of building systems is inevitable even as there may be some bumps along the way.
I feel like many in the anti camp have their own kind of reactionary psychosis. I want nothing to do with AI but I also can't deny my experience of using these tools. I wish there were more venues for this kind of realist but negative discussion of AI. Mitchell is a great dev for this reason.
- 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 streamlined rather than if I had to throw tokens at them and still fail.
Of all the showcases I’ve seen the best are the ones written by people assuming that the token bonanza will not last so they used AI to build tools they wished they had. AI used to build the tool but by no means used by the tool, so if/when token quota gets reduced we still have a functional tool.
by wrxd