Ask HN: Is anyone here also developing "perpetual AI psychosis" like Karpathy?

5•jawerty•1h ago

I read on Reddit about a podcast where Karpathy described how he went from writing 80% of his own code to 0%, being in a constant state of “AI psychosis” because the possibilities feel infinite.

I’ve personally found that my workflow has become very “opportunistic”—I feel like I can do anything with AI, so I try everything. That might be good…or bad. I’d be curious to see what HN has to say, or whether anyone else has experienced something similar.

Here’s the Reddit post for context: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1s08r1c/karpathy_says_he_hasnt_written_a_line_of_code/

Anyone also feeling this way?? If not psychosis which may be an exaggeration then feeling more stressed, frazzled, whatever.

Comments

sameergh•1h ago

Yes a bit, The hard part now is not coding, it is deciding what is actually worth building

salawat•1h ago

Here's the thing. You're kind of dopamine hacking yourself. Using current LLM's is something akin to using a slot machine, and one specifically tuned to work on/predate on knowledge workers.

The fact is, while it can talk a good name, and has been RLHF'd to high heaven to validate you all the bloody time to keep you engaged and burning tokens, your brain is simply tuned to reward any semblance of progress, and you getting a little bit more out of the LLM is in the same damn family of hit you get off coding. The dangerous bit though, is the inherently probabilistic nature of it though. This crank on a prompt may be different from same inputs, but different crank on the machine.

Just remember to get out from in front of the screen, and try to experience the worldly implementations of the systems you think you're building. Without that real world experience, no one's going to trust a bloody thing you do. You are a world model. It's a language model. It may know how to shoot the lingo, you know or can reckon how to do the thing.

Try running yourself a local model on a sufficiently beefy laptop. The lack of instant feedback tends to help soften the feedback loop, and gives you a less "ecstasy" coded position from which to actually objectively evaluate the efficacy of the thing at converting raw electricity -> thing. You'll find the added friction from the additional constraints (no outsourcing to a datacenter funded by someone else's money), suddenly changes the character of the thing.