ZH version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
65% Positive
Analyzed from 2318 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#psychosis#software#money#don#real#need#more#coworker#bad#output
Discussion (34 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I've seen people who talk nonstop about AI, and how it's changed everything, but then there's no quantifiable output that supports their claim.
On the other hand, I've had a friend start a business, and be able to create an app much much faster than what would have been possible in the past. He has real customers paying real money, which makes it easy to validate his claims.
I don't want to get into the nitty gritty, but I'm kind of at the nexus of tech and aviation with my experience in life. The result has been that I can build tools that directly apply to my customers' requirements and I know wtf I'm doing in the industry. I think if I was "just a dev" or "just a former pilot" I'd be kind of screwed because I wouldn't know what I was doing? But, the reality is that because I know how to do both I'm able to make money. I don't have to look up "what an IAP is" means or "what is the 1-4-1 rule and 2-2-1/2 rule" means or "what is an OpSpec?" frantically when I am figuring out what they need. That's quite helpful.
If you know what the hell you're doing, this is a game changer. Like, "oh, I need a custom CRM spooled up that covers things that aren't in typical CRM software" - if you're a developer you probably don't know what people actually want; if you're just an industry expert you don't know wtf sql is. But if you're kind of blend of both you can add real value.
Generalist > specialist right now. I doubt that holds for much more than about a dozen months or so.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rG3PcdTyZ6w
You have two good skills, median-level among those specializations probably, and combine them into a top-tier niche ability.
Also, did you voluntarily disclose that you thought that comment was about you? It feels like you are the friend they were talking about, lol
* end to end rough map of the entire space of compute in their head
* ability to search the internet for the right things
* ability to quickly experiment and try things to figure out how to do things
AI hasn't change that, it just made 2 and 3 into a very efficient thing.
The characterization of psychosis is best described by believing AI can do the first thing. No modern LLM can "reason" - otherwise you could give it a task like "make me money", it would ask you all the questions it needs about information that it doesn't know about and needs to know to make you money, then it would set whatever it needs to set up to make you money.
As such, you still need to know the domain entirely to be effective. When you do that, AI is fantastic at getting you to the right solution. Furthermore, its still in large part actually cheaper to higher a developer who then can use AI to build you the product that you need long term.
If that's your bar for reasoning, then most people can't reason either.
These people have existed forever
I've seen people who work on art nonstop and think their art is really meaningful, get really into it, but there's little output that anyone cares about or that changes the world or that anyone would pay for.
On the other hand I've had friends who created some art, and have real customers paying real money, ....so it's easy to tell their art project is meaningful. (is that the conclusion?)
Maybe something (AI, code, an AI-coded project) doesn't need to have value to others or be worth money for it to be meaningful to the person who created it.
On a more serious note - real art is not validated by making money. If you want to be a full time artist, then you also have to run a business. But if all you care about is the art, then money has no relevance.
Business on the other hand, is all about making money.
I am really struggling with this one right now.
The client's development team is letting Claude document and refactor the product codebase without much intervention, purpose or taste. The thinking being that if Claude first writes a bunch of unit tests and then a bunch of documentation, that any downstream refactoring will magically work out.
I don't know how to convey to management how stupid this is without allowing it to fail in production. AI psychosis (or whatever we want to call it) being a new phenomenon means we might as well be speaking in moon runes to the CEO when trying to explain the situation.
The best countermeasure I can come up with right now is to use their momentum against them. Accelerate the failure. I've got the last known good commit hash written down on a sticky note on my monitor.
HA! I love how he entirely discounts the possibility that there are people for whom AI does significantly increase the real value of their work.
Look - I get it - good software engineers are hard to come by - and a lot of people do make slop. But it's still very naive to think that it all must be slop.
Beyond that, when the tool becomes more than a tool and becomes your coworker, with his/her/its own criteria, taste, methods, etc - than THAT is when the rubber hits the road. haha.
> Delusional disorder is characterized by irrational or intense belief(s) or suspicion(s) that a person believes to be true
it's still a bad fit because there's not currently popular social convention that trusting AI without validation is a bad idea but it's better than psychosis. also it's still stigmatizing and we live in a world where a thesaurus is seconds away at any time. plus psychosis as a diagnosis is typically a cluster of symptoms that go beyond just delusion: https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/294416-overview
Two - there's also an implication that there's 'harm' that this AI psychotic person inflicts on others embedded in this article. in reality, the vast majority of those suffering mental illnesses are far more likely to be harmed by others - https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/conditionsandtrea...
part of the work of being a good mental health advocate is not stigmatizing specific diagnoses as negative social ills. now if you don't give a single shit about mental health I'm not going to argue to get you to care. but if you do care then you should do better
I just watched a company fire an entire department of people under the sincere belief a chatbot run by a middle manager could save them 10 million a year. This failed miserably and they now need to hire or re-hire people.
There is a tremendous amount of harm happening. Psychosis is a perfect term for what is happening.
which isn't to say that layoffs don't suck (I was impacted by one very recently) but it's not psychosis that causes that to happen, it's greed and short-term shareholder-fixated thinking. that should be named instead of a mental illness that people suffer from
FTA: > Prolific AI psychosis occurs when a person generates a large quantity of AI output without significantly increasing the real value of their work.
Guy, we used to just call this a bad coworker.
I'm pretty sure that the "psychosis" will be abused by folks that just don't like AI. You already see it everywhere.
Not that long ago. People generating large quantities of AI output is a relatively recent phenomenon. At least when compared to labels like this.
It's almost as if it's a little bit harder than people think to figure out how good people are at their jobs and who deserves promotions, etc, and that maybe they may not have the most perfect unbiased judgements.
"Bad coworker" can have many causes. In prolific AI psychosis, I think the assumption (differential diagnosis) is, they became a "bad coworker" due to use of AI, so they were a "good coworker" before.
Doesn't it kinda inspire you at least a little to reflect on your understanding of the particular term? Or should we understand that to be faultless here?
In general, the definition we need to have here is that psychosis is always extreme and violent and pretty much matching the cultural trope we have for it? And anything less is incorrect usage? Is that why you disagree in explicit terms?
Myself have a few realizations that I myself find very revealing of my own mental gap/blindness in retrospective:
1. The majority of socalled software engineers are destroyed/exposed by agentic coding tool. Among the reasons, one of them is that they are now addicted to disruption. I realized this through my own work where I utterly destroyed my own sense of software structure by overseeing close to 10 coding sessions across cursor cloud agents and multiple concurrent ones running on desktop. And, I noticed one of my team member becomes not able to make progress even he told me the clear plan, and during one in office work session, I noticed that he habitually browses his phone between cursor working sessions. And at that moment, I realized that person is no longer capable of solving nontrivial problems because his focus is utterly destroyed by the deprived thinking process by cursor.
2. Using AI coding agents to build conventional software is only meaningful for the top team. Put in other words, AI coding agents can only automate the parts of conventional software that is mundane and boring. Note that I am talking of building conventional software, not conventional software engineering. The conventional software engineering best practices still apply to agentic software engineering. Agentic software engineering appears necessary and fitting to building agents themselves, because that's guardrails are crucial, and manually putting guardrails are not a match to agents novel behaviors. And conventional software engineering really is not useful when reasoning and designing agents.
3. Speculatively, I am guessing we'll have some chances of really making breakthrough in designing an agentic safe programming language, which both serve as the constructs of ensuring alignment/safety/etc, and also allows reasonably simple understandability for humans to understand agents output. For one thing, it really makes sense to me that coding agents model CoT should be in the form of some semi/fully-formal (thinking of a better uml, but I don't know what shape it should be) languages that is more effective and precise than natural language, but is also machine verifiable.
4. It's very easy to get used to something that is reliably meeting my expectations. I was shocked by first sight of the unrecognizable but "working" code generated by Claude code by a team member. And when I tried to write an end to end feature myself on platform that I had no experience before, I suddenly become comfortable not looking at the code at all. The transition is as instinctively as how shocked I was at the beginning. And then it takes a long and conscious looking back to dial back the addiction to see that blindness and recover from that.