I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them.
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I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them. I can't name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out.
I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really).
It's frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute "MTTR is all you need" mentality: "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can't yeet resilient systems entirely.
The main issue is I don't even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like "no no, it has full test coverage" or "bug reports are going down" or something, which just don't paint the whole picture.
We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying.
I worry.
I agree with the broad brush strokes, but companies are not monolithic. For example, Management at my employer is completely AI-pilled, but my immediate team is much more sceptical about it, perhaps because we understand the technicalities better than Management does, and perhaps because it's hard to be enthusiastic about something that threatens wholesale job losses.
So there's tension within the organisation: pressure to adopt AI, good reasons not to, and a wide range of opinions represented.
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@mitchellh I would love to see someone commission a study on this. It _feels_ like things are in general getting less reliable atm, esp. the stack I rely on for work (GitHub, Linear, Slack, Notion, VSCode, <insert-tui-tool-here>), but then I can't find any data on any of it.
Agreed. But I think it's worth distinguishing between two aspects of this decrease in reliability: one is the increasing use of #LLMs to write shoddy code that would previously have been written better by humans, but the other is the use of LLMs to find longstanding bugs in code written years ago by humans. The former is a real decrease in reliability; the other is illusory.
