[mitchellh]

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.

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)

[elktown]

I thinking that it’s quite a different experience going all Jackson Pollock with AI in your own studio on your own terms, compared to the sorry state of affairs of having 100s of Pollocks throwing paint around wildly within a corp to meet a paint quota.

[ycombiredd]

> 100s of Pollocks throwing paint around wildly within a corp to meet a paint quota

I wish I had written that.

[leptons]

I can't think of a single case of any AI content, be it prose or code, where I thought "I wish I had written that". With AI code, it's more like I wish I hadn't let the AI write that.

[simonh]

We’re using Copilot at work to build reporting and automation tools. Nothing ground breaking, but very useful and tailored to our needs.

Frankly without AI assistance many of these tools just wouldn’t exist at all. We can build stuff in 6 weeks part time as a side project that would have taken at least 3 months full time, and therefore would not have been feasible. Then we can iterate on it at least 2-4 times faster than with hand coding.

So I’d love to have an extra few developers to just work on that stuff full time, but I don’t.

Whether that means our organisation spend on AI overall is a positive, I really can’t say. Quite possibly not, but my team are getting real benefits.

[vishnugupta]

I’m building reporting for my company and what you said mirrors my experience nearly 100%.

I’m a backend developer so I know what it takes to build a half decent reporting system. Writing all those queries, slice and dice charts and what not takes real time and effort. All that has been outsourced to Claude Code. I now focus on ensuring that the system is sound architecturally and that useful reports are being surfaced.

[NateEag]

How are you dealing with the problem of making sure the reporting queries are correct?

My experience so far is that it's harder and slower for me to understand the genAI code than to write it myself.

Skipping thorough comprehension seems to be the popular choice in my workplace, but it's not one I can justify.

[leptons]

Nothing you wrote is connected in any way to the comment I wrote.

Have you read the code the AI produced? Do you understand all of it? Is it bloated? Would you be proud to say you wrote it?

I don't care how fast you created something. You didn't create it, the AI did, and you have no control over it, the AI does.

[johnnyanmac]

An engineer doesn't care about how fast something is made (at least, not as a primary metric engineering). A salesman cares about how fast they can push to market.

It's clear HN is a bastion of salesmen who happen to have "engineer" in their work title. But the mentality towards actual engineering makes it clear they are primarily salesmen.

[lossyalgo]

Just wait until AI companies stop subsidizing everything and you get the ac

[bahmboo]

I run local models. They are very good now (roughly 30 billion parameters).

[icepush]

Here's a quote from a recent chat with gpt-5.2 that I wish I had come up with: "Anyone can chase a chicken. Leaders create systems."

[outside1234]

What AI gives us is the ability to write code that we wish we didn't have to write. It is the killer one-off tool builder, prototyper, dep upgrader

[Daishiman]

How many ways are there of sending a context dictionary to a template where you can say that there are radically superior ways?

[zipy124]

Quite the visualisation

[Sharlin]

Replace "paint" with "shit" and the visual image becomes even more fitting.

[rjknight]

But then you lose the Jackson Pollock joke, which is what makes it compelling and memorable!

[mathfailure]

...or is it?

[andai]

Earlier today:

>Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48148337

[CoderKatrina]

It's the new "counting lines of code". I think many companies are so terrified of falling behind that they're irrationally floundering, trying to appear like they're "with it".

[xp84]

Yup. My friend said his boss has told them basically that they HAVE TO (do all the AI things) because now ‘our competitors will use AI’ and surpass their product.

In my humble opinion good ideas (what to build) are a big part of the bottleneck and those aren’t substantially in greater supply with AI.

[sgc]

> good ideas ... aren’t substantially in greater supply

Which is sad because they should be. People should be freed up to think and create better things, instead these companies seem to be doing the equivalent of locking their employees in stalls like they do on some animal farms, so they can churn out 'results' ever faster.

[Sharlin]

> People should be freed up to think and create better things,

Good ideas will never ever be prioritized in the vast majority of companies because good ideas cannot be quantified and turned into performance metrics. At least not without invoking Goodhart's law (see: the academia).

[jmalicki]

There is a degree to which quick experimentation helps you find the good ideas, at least for the incremental ones.

[Sharlin]

Counting lines of code starts to look incredibly sane compared to this, where you’re not just counting lines of code, you’re paying for another company for every line produced. There’s exactly one winner here and it’s not any of the companies using AI.

[zelphirkalt]

Actually, it's even more than that, right? Economically, it is pumping up/inflating the bubble some more in a perverted way, where it is not the people themselves believing some horseradish, but their employer forcing them to pump it up more. Quite insane.

[efitz]

Claude, please crease a routine and run it in a loop continuously. The task in the routine is “create the most complex code possible, in a random programming language, that produces the exact output “My senior leaders are pinheads,”

[warumdarum]

Feels like a worldwide goldrush, but not everyone has gold in those hills.

[hunterpayne]

I find that odd given that another division in Amazon is no longer using AI coding tools at all. Its a big company so who knows if this is company wide or just in this one division. I expect its just in one division though.

[drzaiusx11]

Those who burn the most money "win", I guess?

[drzaiusx11]

This is the best characterization of the collective corporate madness I've seen yet. Bravo

[chr15m]

Never mind the Pollocks.

[zelphirkalt]

Can we combine this with the infinite monkey theorem? If we have an infinite number of Pollocks throwing paint at an infinitely large canvas surely they are going to create any piece of art we can imagine...

[sebastiennight]

This does exist, it's the Library of Babel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel#Philosoph...

There's also an online version of the Library of Babel, I just found out that full pages of my own books are in it[0], https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?379:17

[andybak]

I very much like this metaphor.

[3dsnano]

size of org has a lot to do with the entropy

compare 100 pollocks vs 2-3

[selectedambient]

lmao this analogy

[kc-chris]

Oh bollocks.

[suzzer99]

I’ve had to do a ton of SQL stuff lately, which I haven’t really worked with since the late 90s. ChatGPT has been a godsend, not just for me, but for our only coworker who knows SQL well, whom I’d probably be bugging several times a day at my wits’ end.

But no one cares about those kinds of productivity gains. Just the ones that will completely replace us.

[djhn]

I find SQL and data(bases) in general to be LLM’s Achilles’ heel. Databases are rarely under version control, so the training data only has one half of the knowledge.

My comments are more in the context of OLAP queries and other non-normalised data often queried via SQL.

I train non-LLM transformer models on (older and rarer) datasets, and automating the ingestion of sprawling datasets with hundreds of columns, often in a variety of local languages and different naming conventions adopted over decades, with quite a few duplicated columns…. The LLMs perform badly, it’s nigh impossible to test (for me as a user in prod) and it’s nearly impossible for the LLM companies to test (in training) to RLVR and RLHF this.

[flir]

That's interesting - SQL is one of the places I find them the strongest - I think there must be an insane amount of training data out there for SQL. But mostly I'm asking them for ad hoc report queries. Nobody cares if they're bad SQL, they just want to know how many signups there were in March that didn't tick the marketing box. Sounds like you're pushing their capabilities a lot further than I am though - I just want to perform arbitarily complex queries on 3NF data.

[timacles]

Yeah not sure what this guy is talking about, LLMs excel with queries because the SQL language is pretty small in scope and its easy to test the output. Table structure and relationships are easy to feed to the AI.

> I train non-LLM transformer models on (older and rarer) datasets, and automating the ingestion of sprawling datasets with hundreds of columns, often in a variety of local languages and different naming conventions adopted over decades

All of this sounds like basic data processing

[hunterpayne]

"Nobody cares if they're bad SQL"

Laid off your DBAs I see.

[flir]

Ok, ok. Nobody who matters cares if they're bad SQL ;)

[Tycho]

Just use an LLM to make a good knowledge base for the databases. Based on schema info and production queries. An agent can use that to write queries that work.

[hypercube33]

I'm the old school type who writes out a document that explains what I plan on doing in markdown even if it's generic like "a window with x and y buttons" and the logic flow and then use that to have ai write a plan with me before I send it off to execute it. This has worked super well.

I do enjoy giving the frontier models wacky projects that I can't even find examples of how to do online but I don't expect any results or need them and some have done really well with it while others fall on their face (models)

[skydhash]

I'm always amazed by those comments. Why couldn't you buy a book on SQL[0], and spend a week on it? Or just go over to YouTube for a refresher?

[0]: Like https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/sql-queries-for/9780134...

[suttontom]

I'm amazed you think that instead of using an LLM that someone will go buy a book and spend a week learning something that, judging by the fact that they last used it 30 years ago, likely won't be relevant for them soon.

[vintermann]

It's not only that I rarely use it, it's also that it's ugly. It's Relational Cobol. It's as loveable as Oracle. The vendor specific dialects don't even agree on how to do recursive queries do they?

Unfortunately I am very good at forgetting things I resented having to learn, and SQL is definitively one of them.

[nevertoolate]

So you don’t understand what you generate with ai and think that it will be a solution for a problem you can only solve using sql.

[vintermann]

No, it's easy enough to understand the query once the AI has generated it. I have looked up how to do it many times after all.

[jazzyjackson]

If the AI's query pulled what I intended to pull, why should I care to understand the SQL any more than I should understand the Query Plan or the Machine Code?

[flir]

SQL is (was?) one of my strongest skills, I enjoy it a lot, and I still reach for the LLM. It's just faster than me, and when it goes wrong (rarely) I can correct it in plain English.

[Daishiman]

This is fine for a moderately sized query. When your queries start taking in 8 joins and 20 fields per table because you're running queries on Presto with 5 TB of data, not only is it drastically better at writing (because it doesn't mess up the fields), you can ask it to try the query 5 different ways to help you land on the most optimal.

[zelphirkalt]

That's exactly where I would expect it to fail somewhere, changing some part of the query every time it writes one.

[dcrazy]

In my experience, Claude (at least Opus and Sonnet) is pretty good about not misremembering itself.

I think you may be describing the experience of 6-12 months ago.

[dingaling]

This is a great example of AI tech-debt and fragility.

An eight-join query is going to be nigh on unmaintainable should the requirements change, leading to a change-break-change-break spiral as your preferred coding agent tries to fix its previous fixes.

Maybe the wise way to use AI would be to sort out the schema.

[array_key_first]

This feels wrong. 8 joins is almost certainly reporting stuff, not transactional. Contrary to what some SQL-averse devs think, 300 lines of SQL is actually more maintainable than the equivalent ~1000 lines of application code. It's also much faster. And I do think that's the real conversion, because SQL is a much higher level language than currently available application languages. It's also declarative in nature, which helps maintainance.

A highly normalized DB can easily end up with 8 joins required for some function. That's really not out of the question. "Sorting out" the schema then would be... denormalization, which is a thing, but you need to know why you're doing it. And I think 8 joins isn't enough of a reason.

[darkwater]

Yes but developers (or at least web backend developers, who are the ones I interact with the most) are extremely averse to SQL and normalization.

[ctxc]

When you have a general idea of what smells bad vs what's okay...why?

I'd rather get it from the LLM and review

[wartywhoa23]

Simple, because books don't earn OpenAI and Anthropic a dime.

[timacles]

A book on .... SQL? What is this, the 1970s?

[te_chris]

Extremely weird take.

[ofjcihen]

It’s really frustrating too because even just the plain language translation and pattern matching aspects have such incredible uses.

As a cybersecurity IR professional being able to have a constantly logging counterpart who’s also able to go run queries and check logs on its own is an incredible speed boost.

I can just throw it a finding and have it slot it into a timeline and make notes.

I can toss it something mildly interesting to chase down while I focus on the obvious activity.

So many things that don’t involve having it “think” for you and keep you in the front seat.

But all of that is constantly overshadowed by these companies pushing the automation or “reasoning” aspects more and more and the sycophants who screech that it’s perfect and can do no wrong when every serious users experience is that “yes, it definitely can, often to catastrophic effect”.

[lowsong]

> outsourcing their decision making and thinking to AI and not really about using AI itself

> I use AI a ton and I'm having more fun every day than I ever did before

With respect, this is what makes me worry.

If someone is a user of AI, can they really tell the difference between "outsourcing" and "using"? I worry that a lot of people will start out well-intentioned and end up completely outsourced before they realise it.

[achenet]

relevant Derek Sivers article "Delegate, don't Abdicate" https://sive.rs/abdicate

there's a difference between having the LLM write stuff for you, checking it yourself, modifying it and merging it yourself, and just blindly trusting it to do whatever it wants.

You can ask an overseas consultant to prepare a prototype of your program for you, check it yourself, and only use it if it passes your standards, or fire your whole dev team and blindly trust the overseas bodyshop.

The difference, at least from my point of view, between "using" and "outsourcing" is that in the former case, you're still responsible for the output, you view it as a tool that helps in some use cases, vs just giving up all control.

[jmalicki]

The worst part of AI is that the time to produce software has become entirely unpredictable. "If Claude is randomly good at this, and happens to be up today, it will take me about 3 hours. If Claude is randomly bad at this task, or has downtime, 2 weeks"

[mcmcmc]

Hi Mitchell. Psychosis is a serious psychiatric condition that can be induced or triggered by AI. “AI psychosis” in this context is a misuse of a clinical term. Your tweet describes a disagreement on a value judgment that boils down to “move fast and break things” with high trust in AI outputs vs going all in on quality and reliability with low trust in AI. It’s an engineering tradeoff like any other.

Claiming that the people who disagree with you must be experiencing a form of psychosis, experiencing actual hallucinations and unable to tell what is real, is a weak ad hominem that comes off no better than calling them retarded or schizophrenic.

If you genuinely think one of your friends is going through a psychotic episode, you should be trying to get to them professional help. But don’t assume you can diagnose a human psyche just because you can diagnose a software bug.

[Yokohiii]

He uses "AI psychosis" as a description of people that are overzealous on AI. He is obviously not a person that can or would diagnose mental illness.

To the wider audience on HN the phrasing is pretty clear. An outsider with a tiny bit or intellectual charity wouldn't come to conclusions like you do.

[mcmcmc]

People would understand what he meant if he called someone awkward “autistic” too. It’s wrong to use medical terms as slang because it erases the actual meaning and disregards the lived experience of people who have been through the condition. People who have been around psychosis would come to the same conclusion. The majority of the population not having that exposure doesn’t make it right. It’s tasteless and inappropriate.

[noufalibrahim]

Using terms from domain metaphorically in another is a common and, I think, useful way of communication. While a view like yours has genuine merit, especially for a subset of the population who have experience personal or otherwise, with the medical condition, I think it's overly restrictive and counter productive to label it as outright tasteless and inappropriate.

[benatkin]

It's also harmful to overly gatekeep the term autism to the point where a lot of legitimate uses are discouraged, and it happens a lot, if you let it.

[mcmcmc]

If the tweet had called his friends autistic, would that be a legitimate use?

[mathfailure]

Yes.

[kevinwang]

Yeah, but AI psychosis can also be used to mean the stronger thing that the parent comment refers to -- something like AI-induced psychosis, which was how I originally understood the term:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatbot_psychosis

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spi...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/technology/chatgpt-ai-cha...

[Yokohiii]

I am aware of the conflict between medical and slang semantics. This doesn't change my commentary.

[kevinwang]

Well, I agree with you that the parent comment is wrong inasmuch as it suggests we can't tell from context that mitchellh is using the term to mean "a value judgment" instead of "a form of psychosis". We can tell.

But I agree with the parent comment in that we shouldn't use the term "AI psychosis" to mean "a value judgment" instead of "a form of psychosis", because "AI psychosis" has already been used for 2.5 years to mean "a form of psychosis".

[andai]

Psychosis does not require hallucinations. Delusions are sufficient.

The key factor is losing touch with reality, which results in individual or collective harm.

There is also such a thing as mass psychosis, and those are unfortunately a more difficult situation because the government and corporations are generally the ones driving them, and they are culturally normalized.

[mcmcmc]

Yes. I was offering examples. Again, having a difference of opinion is not a delusion.

If he meant mass psychosis, he should have said mass psychosis. And again, since he is not a public health scientist or any flavor of psych professional, he probably shouldn’t make those proclamations. And should probably call for a wellness check instead of posting on social media if he were truly concerned for their health.

[hoppp]

I don't think this is all psychosis but more like extreme groupthink.

For people who are considered neurotypical, social coherence often overwrites reality. Its a mechanism for achieving consensus withing groups while spending the least amount of brain compute energy. Same goes for social metainfo tagged messages, they are more likely to influence reality perception, subconsciously. E.G: If a rich guy says you should be hyped the people who wanna get rich will feel hyped and emotional contagion can spread between people who belong to the same "tribe"

It's very visible for us atypical folk who can't participate well in groupthink at all

[benatkin]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folie_%C3%A0_deux

I guess at a company of seven, if two people are making the executive decisions and the two people are drinking the same AI kool-aid and the other five people are dutifully following these executive decisions, the whole company can be considered to be under this condition.

[hoppp]

I just thought that instead of psychosis it's just regular groupthink

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink

Maybe the difference would be the level of absurdity that's accepted

[array_key_first]

Having a difference of opinion can absolutely be a delusion. For example, I think you're probably not God. If you thought you were God, then we'd disagree, and you'd also be delusional.

I use that example because I have literally seen people fall into delusions of thinking they're God after talking to AI enough. That's shit is scary, for real.

[goatlover]

Would you prefer it be called reality distortion field? People use slang, woke scolding the internet isn't going to change that.

[topaz0]

"unable to tell what is real" is an an accurate characterization of the people he's describing imo.

[cybercatgurrl]

was looking for this comment. this post is highly inappropriate and very inaccurate. this should be at the top. too many people are throwing around the word psychosis without knowing what it means. if someone is truely going through psychosis you get them help!