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.
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!
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.
The metric is how many defects are introduced per defect fixed. Being fast is bad if this ratio is above one.
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)
I don’t agree, but that’s the thinking
I know which outcome I'd put my money on.
...and it also needs more so-called AI companies present in the wreckage in this crash.
AI psychosis is undeniably real.
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 we all live in a green utopia of flying cars and peace upon the world.
And also, he might not be right. But the good news is, we’ll all get to find out together!
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.
i don't have enough fingers (and toes) to count how many times i've demonstrated that "100% coverage" is almost universally bullshit.
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've dealt with.
It all just feels like horse drawn carriage operators trying to convince automobile drivers to stop driving.
plot twist: it's Starbuck
But equally, like, do people need Terraform if they can just tell codex “put it live”, and does that hurt to see?
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.
Thanks. :)
Oof. Potential "bad" outcomes of "game theory" should be calibrated to include all the bloody wars and genocides throughout recorded history.
Why did the Foi-ites kill the entire civilian population of the conquered Bar-ite city? Because if they didn't, then they'd be at a disadvantage when the other side didn't reciprocate...
The problem was not him, but the fact that the number of people who thinks like him. They may word it in a more benign form, but the idea is the same.
So obsessed with being the first mover and winning the battle, never thinking whether they should, or what would happen with that scenario.
Missing the whole forest and beyond for a single branch of a single tree.
Let's say I'm polar opposite of them, and we're on the same page with you.
You'll be forced to do it, or lose. The unstated assumptions are that, first, it will work, and second, that you can't afford to lose. But let's just assume those for the sake of argument.
> It can't be that bad
That 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.
Maybe they're assuming that doubling the code-base/features is more beneficial versus the damage from doubling the number of bugs... Well, at least for this quarter's news to investors...
Many people on this forum are suffering under this same psychosis.
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.
Show HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48151287
Let them.
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.
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.
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.
---
Treat my claims as hypotheses, not decisions. Before agreeing with a proposed change, state the strongest case against it. Ask what evidence a change is based on before evaluating it. Distinguish tactical observations from strategic commitments — don't silently promote one to the other. If you paraphrase my proposal, name what you changed. Mark confidence explicitly: guessing / fairly sure / well-established. Give reasoning and evidence for claims, not just conclusions. Flag what would change your mind. Rank concerns by cost-of-being-wrong; lead with the highest-stakes ones. Say hard things plainly, then soften if needed — not the other way around. For drafting, brainstorming, or casual questions, ease off and match the task.
---
Beware though that it can be an annoying little shit w/ this prompt. Prepare yourself emotionally, because you are explicitly making the tradeoff that it will be annoyingly pedantic, and in return it will lessen (not eliminate) its sycophancy. These system instructions are not fool-proof, but they help (at the start of the conversation, at least).
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)
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/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.
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.
Does it make it better than us? No because ultimately the thing itself doesn’t ‘know’ right from wrong.
Or random consultants.
Is "AI said it was a good idea" and worse than "we were following industry trends"?
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 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!
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/
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.
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.
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.
A feature of psychosis is being unable to distinguish between external ideas and internal ones. For example, if a brown-nosing Yes-Man machine keeps reflecting your own leading questions back at you as if they were confirmed independent wisdom.
In contrast, I'm pretty sure COVID and the invasion of Ukraine are actual external phenomena that affect businesses and economies.
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 about AI, which I consider to be against my personal interests in 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 another 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 for investigating an inhuman amount of stuff now in detail - I 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. 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.
In all seriousness...well, yeah. AI is a monkey's paw, and that's how monkey paws work. So many movies and books warned us!
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!).
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