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 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't let it do the thinking and decision making.
mitchellh 4 minutes ago [-]
Correct. I use AI a ton and I'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.
He uses AI himself, so I agree he doesn't see AI use as black/white.
Hard agree about ideas, thinking, advice. AI's sycophancy is a huge subtle problem. I've tried my best to create a system prompt to guard against this w/ Opus 4.7. It doesn'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/ Opus 4.7.
slopinthebag 13 minutes ago [-]
> companies and people outsourcing their decision making and thinking to AI
It's so interesting how easy it is to steer the LLM'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 "yes, and".
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's gonna end in disaster.
Sharlin 4 minutes ago [-]
It’s almost as if we haven’t learned anything from Hans the horse, Ouija boards, "facilitated communication", or the countless examples of the folly of surrounding yourself with yes men. The point about improv is spot on.
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 "If this breaks in prod, I won't be able to fix it. And they'll page me at 3AM" we've relied on to build stable systems.
The general laziness of looking for a perfect library on CPAN so that I don'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've been telling people to write code instead of typing it all on my own & setting up pitfalls to catch bad code in testing.
But one thing it doesn't do is "write less code"[1].
This post calls out how you can'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't do!"
the top reply is from someone doing exactly that, arguing "but the agents are so fast!"
Terr_ 3 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
bayindirh 9 minutes ago [-]
I was talking with a friend in the early days of AI boom. I argued that over-resilience in AI will create all kinds of catastrophes.
The answer I got is "It's game theory. Someone will do it, and you'll be forced to do it, too. It can't be that bad".
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't like this.
Terr_ 1 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
chrisweekly 5 minutes ago [-]
reliance, not resilience
miek 29 minutes ago [-]
My very large employer has always been glacially slow on modernization and tech adoption. It may now, oddly enough, become a competitive advantage.
DCKP 27 minutes ago [-]
Literally the plot of Battlestar Galactica! Life imitates art indeed...
The_Blade 2 minutes ago [-]
who is the Starbuck of AI?
plot twist: it's Starbuck
Barrin92 16 minutes ago [-]
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've never been so glad to work in a culture where this mania doesn't exist. Reading HN is like entering Alice's Wonderland of token maxxers and AI psychotics. Genuinely don't know a single person here who is forced to work like this.
alexnewman 14 minutes ago [-]
Ah so it's like 2000 again. Germany will go even farther behind it seems
First DEI, then COVID, then Ukraine, then AI. The US always needs its three to five years mass psychosis and then moves to the next shiny object. Many people and corporations get rich in each cycle.
AI exacerbates the problem since vulnerable tech people develop individual AI psychosis and participate in the mass psychosis.
Companies have figured out that no other population group is as gullible as tech people (they were instrumental in pushing all of the above four issues), so they exploit it again and again.
vadepaysa 4 minutes ago [-]
"Just use autoresearch and it will fix your app's memory leaks in an hour" 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.
Groxx 25 minutes ago [-]
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/company collapses.
infinite_spin 7 minutes ago [-]
I agree, and I'd like to point out that this problem isn'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.
nialse 37 minutes ago [-]
I'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.
sph 2 minutes ago [-]
> When [...] all outputs are formally verified based on exquisite architectures and standards
and we all live in a green utopia of flying cars and peace upon the world.
DiscourseFan 25 minutes ago [-]
They are being developed, but it takes over a decade for this to happen normally
senordevnyc 36 minutes ago [-]
Will never happen, for the exact reason that we’ve almost never done that for human output either.
sitkack 34 minutes ago [-]
it is required now, or all civilization collapses.
sph 5 minutes ago [-]
Civilization collapses unless people stop being short-sighted and greedy, trying to cut corners whenever possible?
I know which outcome I'd put my money on.
platinumrad 22 minutes ago [-]
You're going to have to expand on this one.
nialse 25 minutes ago [-]
Another argument for less human-like AI then, I guess.
stego-tech 21 minutes ago [-]
That’s literally just software though.
saltyoldman 30 minutes ago [-]
There was not a renaissance to move back to Assembly when Java sucked. Instead more Java developers were created.
999900000999 19 minutes ago [-]
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
gizajob 10 minutes ago [-]
The exact same thing was meant to happen when the desktop computer became prevalent. Then the internet. Look at us now.
risyachka 11 minutes ago [-]
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.
throwaway613746 4 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
rvz 27 minutes ago [-]
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.
gizajob 9 minutes ago [-]
The entire stock market is undergoing AI psychosis.
spicyusername 11 minutes ago [-]
We're definitely in the mess around phase of AI adoption.
I don't think it's super clear what we'll find out.
We'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's good enough.
Given the state of the industry were clearly going to find out one way or the other, hah!
linkregister 5 minutes ago [-]
I don'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't cope with undisciplined engineering will succumb to unacceptable reliability and be outcompeted, just like in the "move fast and break things" era.
throwawaypath 15 minutes ago [-]
Mitchellh is on to something. Some of the AI products I've seen seem like psychosis hallucinatory fever dreams, using terms and concepts that have no meaning. Funding? $50,000,000 pre-seed.
bsenftner 13 minutes ago [-]
This is a critical communications issue that is becoming what I believe the defining characteristic of "This Age": 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.
mattgreenrocks 18 minutes ago [-]
The only way many people learn that the stove is hot is by burning their hands on it.
Let them.
hooo 6 minutes ago [-]
Why do you all still submit twitter.com links when that domain does not even work?
ivanjermakov 18 minutes ago [-]
Deprecating immature workflows (LLM agents in this case) is much simpler and faster than building them from scratch. Many companies get this rush assessment right. The case where being wrong is much more costly than being right.
kelnos 9 minutes ago [-]
I'm not convinced. There's a ton of cost to adopting a radically different workflow.
robotswantdata 38 minutes ago [-]
Most labs are shilling “AI worker” dreams to these very companies
tacostakohashi 38 minutes ago [-]
"no no, it has full test coverage"
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's the inmates running the asylum.
ares623 16 minutes ago [-]
I was rewatching Rich Hickey's "Simple Made Easy" talk (as one does) and there was a great line about full test coverage.
"What's true about all bugs in production? (pause for dramatic effect) They all passed the tests!" (well, he said typechecker but I think the point stands)
45 minutes ago [-]
elevation 27 minutes ago [-]
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.
peyton 1 minutes ago [-]
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?
bolangi 19 minutes ago [-]
When war psychosis is not enough....
perching_aix 1 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
LunicLynx 30 minutes ago [-]
Either this or we humans are out of the picture soon.
arm32 24 minutes ago [-]
Occams' razor would assume the former.
slopinthebag 25 minutes ago [-]
I have a ton of respect for Mitchell - I didn'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.
glitchcrab 6 minutes ago [-]
I'm guessing you've never heard of Hashicorp (Terraform, Vault) then? Mitchell == Hashicorp.
leeoniya 30 minutes ago [-]
> "no no, it has full test coverage"
i don't have enough fingers (and toes) to count how many times i've demonstrated that "100% coverage" is almost universally bullshit.
kevinsync 18 minutes ago [-]
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.
CodingJeebus 34 minutes ago [-]
Anyone who'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.
hungryhobbit 13 minutes ago [-]
Or anyone who even wants VC funding. 90+% of investors only want to invest in AI companies.
If you're not doing AI there's an incredibly limited pool of people who will give you $$$ ... and you're competing with EVERY OTHER NON-AI COMPANY for their attention.
infamouscow 19 minutes ago [-]
On the bright side, my guillotine & rope startup is going to make a killing (no pun intended).
panavm 6 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
jgbuddy 21 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
senordevnyc 37 minutes ago [-]
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 / 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!
selectively 23 minutes ago [-]
I do not believe 'AI psychosis' is an actual thing.
woeirua 29 minutes ago [-]
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.
9dev 22 minutes ago [-]
If you want to draw that line of argument - it's more like horse riders being convinced to give up their horses in favour of trains: You're travelling faster, don't have to navigate yourself, or think about every boulder on the way; but there are destinations you can't go, overcrowded trains slowing down the journey, hefty ticket prices, and instead of enjoying the freedom, you're degraded to a passive passenger.
hansmayer 15 minutes ago [-]
Very funny, this. Did we need forward deployed engineers to convince people that they absolutely need to use the trains in order to "not be left behind"? Or otherwise hype? Or was it sort of obvious and did not need to explained so much - like a bad joke called LLMs ?
caconym_ 22 minutes ago [-]
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't know how they worked.
jgbuddy 22 minutes ago [-]
agreed completely
weinzierl 44 minutes ago [-]
"its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!"
Hmm, I agree with the point OP is making, but I'm not so sure this is the best supporting argument.
The bottleneck is finding the bugs and if he'd criticized people saying AI will be the panacea to that I'd be with him, but people saying agents are fast and good at fixing human found bugs is nothing I'd object to.
Agents are fixing bugs so quickly and at a scale humans can't do already.
lolc 22 minutes ago [-]
> Agents are fixing bugs so quickly and at a scale humans can't do already.
The metric is how many defects are introduced per defect fixed. Being fast is bad if this ratio is above one.
babarock 23 minutes ago [-]
The tweet is criticizing over-reliance on the "agents will fix it anyway".
The fact that we can fix things faster now doesn't mean that we should throw away caution and prevention. The specific point of his tweet is that we're seeing a lot of people starting to skip proper release engineering.
Agents are quick to fix bugs, yes, but it doesn'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.
woeirua 31 minutes ago [-]
You got downvoted for speaking the truth. HN has a strong anti-AI contingent. They won’t concede until you can just ask Codex or Opus “find and fix all the bugs in this codebase”. We’re not there yet, but soon we will be. Then what?
11 minutes ago [-]
maxbond 20 minutes ago [-]
More likely people thought GP was missing the point; "MTTR-optimized YOLO deployment" 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'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's whether you can shirk reviewing for bugs if MTTR is fast enough. There are circumstances where YOLO is appropriate, but they aren't the production environment of a mature application.
hansmayer 19 minutes ago [-]
> won’t concede until you can just ask Codex or Opus “find and fix all the bugs in this
But 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.
> but soon we will be.
Ah yes, in the 3-6 months, right? This time next year Rodney, we'll be millionaires!
Rendered at 21:42:57 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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 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't let it do the thinking and decision making.
Here's some other topics I've written on it:
- https://mitchellh.com/writing/my-ai-adoption-journey
- https://mitchellh.com/writing/building-block-economy
- https://mitchellh.com/writing/simdutf-no-libcxx (complex change thanks to AI, shows how I approach it rationally)
Hard agree about ideas, thinking, advice. AI's sycophancy is a huge subtle problem. I've tried my best to create a system prompt to guard against this w/ Opus 4.7. It doesn'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/ Opus 4.7.
It's so interesting how easy it is to steer the LLM'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 "yes, and".
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's gonna end in disaster.
Show HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48151287
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 "If this breaks in prod, I won't be able to fix it. And they'll page me at 3AM" we've relied on to build stable systems.
The general laziness of looking for a perfect library on CPAN so that I don'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've been telling people to write code instead of typing it all on my own & setting up pitfalls to catch bad code in testing.
But one thing it doesn't do is "write less code"[1].
[1] - https://xcancel.com/t3rmin4t0r/status/2019277780517781522/
the top reply is from someone doing exactly that, arguing "but the agents are so fast!"
The answer I got is "It's game theory. Someone will do it, and you'll be forced to do it, too. It can't be that bad".
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't like this.
plot twist: it's Starbuck
AI exacerbates the problem since vulnerable tech people develop individual AI psychosis and participate in the mass psychosis.
Companies have figured out that no other population group is as gullible as tech people (they were instrumental in pushing all of the above four issues), so they exploit it again and again.
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.
and we all live in a green utopia of flying cars and peace upon the world.
I know which outcome I'd put my money on.
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
But I only see mass layoffs and those who are working - are working longer and harder then before.
...and it also needs more so-called AI companies present in the wreckage in this crash.
AI psychosis is undeniably real.
I don't think it's super clear what we'll find out.
We'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's good enough.
Given the state of the industry were clearly going to find out one way or the other, hah!
Eventually the companies that can't cope with undisciplined engineering will succumb to unacceptable reliability and be outcompeted, just like in the "move fast and break things" era.
Let them.
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's the inmates running the asylum.
"What's true about all bugs in production? (pause for dramatic effect) They all passed the tests!" (well, he said typechecker but I think the point stands)
But equally, like, do people need Terraform if they can just tell codex “put it live”, and does that hurt to see?
Many people on this forum are suffering under this same psychosis.
i don't have enough fingers (and toes) to count how many times i've demonstrated that "100% coverage" is almost universally bullshit.
If you're not doing AI there's an incredibly limited pool of people who will give you $$$ ... and you're competing with EVERY OTHER NON-AI COMPANY for their attention.
And also, he might not be right. But the good news is, we’ll all get to find out together!
It all just feels like horse drawn carriage operators trying to convince automobile drivers to stop driving.
Hmm, I agree with the point OP is making, but I'm not so sure this is the best supporting argument. The bottleneck is finding the bugs and if he'd criticized people saying AI will be the panacea to that I'd be with him, but people saying agents are fast and good at fixing human found bugs is nothing I'd object to.
Agents are fixing bugs so quickly and at a scale humans can't do already.
The metric is how many defects are introduced per defect fixed. Being fast is bad if this ratio is above one.
The fact that we can fix things faster now doesn't mean that we should throw away caution and prevention. The specific point of his tweet is that we're seeing a lot of people starting to skip proper release engineering.
Agents are quick to fix bugs, yes, but it doesn'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.
So the point is not that agents cannot find bugs (they certainly can), it's whether you can shirk reviewing for bugs if MTTR is fast enough. There are circumstances where YOLO is appropriate, but they aren't the production environment of a mature application.
But 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.
> but soon we will be.
Ah yes, in the 3-6 months, right? This time next year Rodney, we'll be millionaires!