6 ms·

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 characterizat

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/my-ai-adoption-journey - https://mitchellh.com/writing/building-block-economy https://mitchellh.com/writing/building-block-economy - https://mitchellh.com/writing/simdutf-no-libcxx https://mitchellh.com/writing/simdutf-no-libcxx (complex change thanks to AI, shows how I approach it rationally)

elktown 4mo ago
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.
- andybak 4mo ago
  I very much like this metaphor.
- andai 4mo ago
  Earlier today: >Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48148337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48148337
  - CoderKatrina 4mo ago
    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 4mo ago
      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.
      - deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
      - sgc 4mo ago
        > 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 4mo ago
        > 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).
        34df 4mo ago
        Good ideas also take resources like time, free-space to think etc... many firms dont understand this. Moreover many firms believe the C-Suite are the almighty with the gods gift of great ideas.
      - jmalicki 4mo ago
        There is a degree to which quick experimentation helps you find the good ideas, at least for the incremental ones.
    - zelphirkalt 4mo ago
      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 4mo ago
        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,”
    - Sharlin 4mo ago
      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.
    - warumdarum 4mo ago
      Feels like a worldwide goldrush, but not everyone has gold in those hills.
  - drzaiusx11 4mo ago
    Those who burn the most money "win", I guess?
  - hunterpayne 4mo ago
    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.
- 3dsnano 4mo ago
  size of org has a lot to do with the entropy compare 100 pollocks vs 2-3
- ycombiredd 4mo ago
  > 100s of Pollocks throwing paint around wildly within a corp to meet a paint quota I wish I had written that.
  - leptons 4mo ago
    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.
    - Daishiman 4mo ago
      How many ways are there of sending a context dictionary to a template where you can say that there are radically superior ways?
    - simonh 4mo ago
      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 4mo ago
        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.
- chr15m 4mo ago
  Never mind the Pollocks.
- kc-chris 4mo ago
  Oh bollocks.
- selectedambient 4mo ago
  lmao this analogy
- zelphirkalt 4mo ago
  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 4mo ago
    This does exist, it's the Library of Babel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel#Philosophical_implications 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 https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?379:17
- drzaiusx11 4mo ago
  This is the best characterization of the collective corporate madness I've seen yet. Bravo
mcmcmc 4mo ago
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.
- andai 4mo ago
  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 4mo ago
    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 4mo ago
      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
suzzer99 4mo ago
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.
- hypercube33 4mo ago
  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 4mo ago
  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/9780134858432/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/sql-queries-for/9780134...
  - ctxc 4mo ago
    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
  - Daishiman 4mo ago
    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.
lowsong 4mo ago
> 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 4mo ago
  relevant Derek Sivers article "Delegate, don't Abdicate" https://sive.rs/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.
youknowwhoiam11 4mo ago
[dead]
ofjcihen 4mo ago
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”.
jmalicki 4mo ago
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"

elktown 4mo ago

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.

andybak 4mo ago
I very much like this metaphor.
andai 4mo ago
Earlier today: >Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48148337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48148337
- CoderKatrina 4mo ago
  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 4mo ago
    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.
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    - sgc 4mo ago
      > 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 4mo ago
        > 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).
        34df 4mo ago
        Good ideas also take resources like time, free-space to think etc... many firms dont understand this. Moreover many firms believe the C-Suite are the almighty with the gods gift of great ideas.
    - jmalicki 4mo ago
      There is a degree to which quick experimentation helps you find the good ideas, at least for the incremental ones.
  - zelphirkalt 4mo ago
    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 4mo ago
      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,”
  - Sharlin 4mo ago
    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.
  - warumdarum 4mo ago
    Feels like a worldwide goldrush, but not everyone has gold in those hills.
- drzaiusx11 4mo ago
  Those who burn the most money "win", I guess?
- hunterpayne 4mo ago
  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.
3dsnano 4mo ago
size of org has a lot to do with the entropy compare 100 pollocks vs 2-3
ycombiredd 4mo ago
> 100s of Pollocks throwing paint around wildly within a corp to meet a paint quota I wish I had written that.
- leptons 4mo ago
  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.
  - Daishiman 4mo ago
    How many ways are there of sending a context dictionary to a template where you can say that there are radically superior ways?
  - simonh 4mo ago
    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 4mo ago
      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.
chr15m 4mo ago
Never mind the Pollocks.
kc-chris 4mo ago
Oh bollocks.
selectedambient 4mo ago
lmao this analogy
zelphirkalt 4mo ago
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 4mo ago
  This does exist, it's the Library of Babel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel#Philosophical_implications 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 https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?379:17
drzaiusx11 4mo ago
This is the best characterization of the collective corporate madness I've seen yet. Bravo

mcmcmc 4mo ago

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.

andai 4mo ago
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 4mo ago
  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 4mo ago
    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

suzzer99 4mo ago

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.

hypercube33 4mo ago
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 4mo ago
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/9780134858432/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/sql-queries-for/9780134...
- ctxc 4mo ago
  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
- Daishiman 4mo ago
  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.

lowsong 4mo ago

> 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 4mo ago
relevant Derek Sivers article "Delegate, don't Abdicate" https://sive.rs/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.

youknowwhoiam11 4mo ago

[dead]

ofjcihen 4mo ago

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”.

jmalicki 4mo ago

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"