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AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

469 points by subset 2mo ago

jauntywundrkind 2mo ago
Broadly I don't think this is quite so true, quite such a mortal threat. What I see are that there are a lot of extremely fake humans, who want and need cover. Who have absurd ridiculous (and often dastardly or sinister) plans. Who want to do things, a-priori. But could never get away with their actions, in any just clear reasoned normal rules of society. And AI is this new circuit breaker. It's innovative permission to move ridiculously fast and break everything, right now. Take the perhaps old IBM slide and flip it upside down, > A computer can never be held accountable. > Therefore a computer must never make a management decision https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/3/a-computer-can-never-be-held-accountable/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/3/a-computer-can-never-be... The people "using" AI today to "make decisions" are using it because AI cannot be held accountable therefore that is the cover for their decisions. This is is all such a resounding PKD nightmare, a reality bring invaded by Fake Humans. It was that was already, just gobs of nonsense, the worst liars spreading the most ridiculous memetic caltrap everywhere: Bullshit Asymmetry Principle weaponized against reason to ever higher degrees, Fox News terrormongering advanced and advanced, Hastert Rule obstructionist politics by wicked pedophile protectors and system ruiners and monsters. AI is a rapid accelerant for burning down reality, for propagating the disreality that the fake humans require for existence. Un-people truly from some other dimension, who've worked and worked to get away with their twisted anti- reality over us all. AI can and does help with a lot of decision making, in good ways. It's an incredibly tool. It can comb through incredible amounts of data. But it's primary use in "decision making" seems to be in deflecting responsibility, in making hideous choices no human system could reasonably make. In concocting fabulations. Both of management design, and endless fuel nightmare disreality slop video to dislodge any last bits of real reality still clinging on (hello ai faked campaign videos!). The "frothing excitement" here is the frothing excitement to destroy society, to be and bring out the most wicked brutal careless world that can be brought upon us, to raise up the Theil-istic/(Octavia) Butler-ian nightmare neofuedalim. It is to escape accountability, to give cover for sin savagery and sabotage. (Regarding the article, I do think it's worth tempering ones read of this article by reading the authors previous work on AI. Which to me exposes their baises and in my view makes them so vastly unreliable & overdramatic a narrator as to be near worthless. Their other submissions are less greviously clearly full of it, but also tend towards ridiculous over-grandiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48002795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48002795 )
gnabgib 2mo ago
Small discussion yesterday (43 points, 7 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48956153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48956153
azakai 2mo ago
> All of the AI projects we have observed as a team are failing. Every single one – we have seen 0% success in a year and a half, What is an "AI project"? The post doesn't define it. Is it writing some software from scratch? Using an LLM chatbot by non-coders, either internally or externally? Or something else entirely? Some examples would really help.
- parpfish 2mo ago
  i feel like the useful applications of AI get silently integrated into workflows. the ill-conceived moonshots by and for a non-technical audience get labelled as "AI projects/initiatives" and they fail.
  - jaggederest 2mo ago
    That has ever been the case. As soon as it works reliably, it's not "AI" any more. Take spellcheckers or collaborative filtering as examples, but there are lots more. Hofstadter in G.E.B. said it well: > There is a related “Theorem” about progress in AI: once some mental function is programmed, people soon cease to consider it as an essential ingredient of “real thinking”. The ineluctable core of intelligence is always in that next thing which hasn’t yet been programmed. This “Theorem” was first proposed to me by Larry Tesler, so I call it Tesler’s Theorem: “AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet.”
    - ambicapter 2mo ago
      Sure, or maybe the actual applications of “AI” are small and unobtrusive, like the dictation of doctor’s notes example, and it’s not actually the massive revolution it’s claimed to be.
      - jaggederest 2mo ago
        I struggle to reconcile this attitude with, among other things, the massive number of exploits being discovered and the pretty straightforward utility for coding. Have you used codex recently?
slopinthebag 2mo ago
The AI mania has been really fascinating to witness because on the surface it’s surprising that so many otherwise intelligent people have fallen into it. But I suppose intelligence as a concept is multifaceted and doesn’t include wisdom. I also wonder if it has to do with personality, where the people whose personality best suits leadership roles are more susceptible to this psychosis. I think there is also an archetype of “nerd” who believes they are smarter than they are and has all sorts of surface beliefs about AI from sci-fi that makes them susceptible.
- bobthepanda 2mo ago
  It’s also a bit of a dilemma; if your boss has AI mania, and you buying into it or not is the difference between being promoted, keeping your job, passed up or even fired, the rational course of action for self-preservation is to also buy into the mania.
  - slopinthebag 2mo ago
    Yeah but that doesn't explain the people on anonymous forums talking like they have a brainworm.
    - jerf 2mo ago
      You can't get a fad like this with a true believer rate of 0. Too unstable. You have to have some true believers in the mix to see this situation arise, preferably widely distributed throughout the population.
    - bluefirebrand 2mo ago
      Something I think about quite often with HN is there are probably people on this forum that have friends / family who work at AI companies or are highly monetarily invested in AI themselves. I don't think everyone on this forum is as objective as we'd like to think. I know I'm not. A large part of why I dislike AI is because I view it as making my life, personally, worse. It has completely fucked up the career I've been building for going on two decades And all I hear is "adapt or die" from assholes who are chugging the AI koolaid by the bucketfull
LOCNE55 2mo ago
This post feels like its correct but also doesn't align with my own personal usage of claude for writing advanced sql and python code. I haven't with my own eyes seen an AI chatbot actually deliver a user experience that lets them query data with natural language BUT I have personally experienced writing extremely advanced queries using natural language and it is absolutely able to get close to (by my estimate) 80-90% of the way there. There surely are companies out there using AI in such a way that is actually advancing them above and beyond their competition. They are probably quietly doing it rather than announcing it loudly. The whole point of the article is about the big corps with hordes of management and people in them. My argument is that they have always been that way. Before AI it was "data science and analytics" or (as the author says) "blockchain".
- ogvorbin 2mo ago
  [dead]
- andersmurphy 2mo ago
  Maybe maybe not. In large organisations for each person creating value with LLMs there are probably more destroying value. Bob used to only waste one person time with LLMs he can waste the entire organisations time. Anyone can use an LLM make a bad ideas sound like a good idea. I imagine this will lead to insane amounts of productivity loss as the entire organisation ends up pivoting to follow the bad idea of a mediocre VP etc.
- ryaniscool 2mo ago
  Don't agree with the hyperbole in the article but I think the broad strokes are there. I'm the same as you, AI has excelled at small tasks and daily chores. Like writing a complex query in seconds that used to take an hour to work out. Doing feature development seems to take just as long or productivity gains are modest (where I work at least) and I think the reason is touched on in the article. Most orgs are just terminally bad at building software.
- nitwit005 2mo ago
  When executives say "AI", they basically seem to mean LLMs right now. AI that just, does something, like extract text from scanned documents, is apparently boring. They don't seem interested in bragging about boring things. The companies tracking AI usage don't seem to be tracking usage of that sort of thing either.
kbar13 2mo ago
honestly just seems like selection bias right? 0% success rate with ai projects, really? based on some of their other about us material it seems like they probably only attract companies that aren't motivated to adopt ai successfully.
- dannersy 2mo ago
  If you read the article, the go over a case where they introduce AI into their pitch and were met with results they were not comfortable with.
A1kmm 2mo ago
> All of the AI projects we have observed as a team are failing. Every single one – we have seen 0% success in a year and a half, not only amongst projects we have been asked to participate in, but even within projects that we have observed in passing while doing totally unrelated work. That's got to be hyperbole, which blows out their credibility. They chose to say 'AI' rather than, for example, LLM, or Transformer model, or Diffusion model. This means they are including a huge swathe of things dating back to Expert Systems in their claim. And who hasn't seen productivity gains from more established AI technology - at least things like semantic search? Who hasn't seen diffusion models generating content in roles that might have done the work by hand before? Who hasn't seen some kind of regression algorithm (even using linear regression in a supervised context counts as AI - so you can absolutely do AI even in tools like Excel) improve operation productivity? Even if they narrowed it to the Transformer model LLMs which re-ignited recent public interest in AI, less ambitious projects to give them to engineering staff to automate easy but boring tasks in the background generally have been a success. More ambitious ones that are beyond what you'd reasonably expect the models to be able to do - for sure, those tend to fail. For most of these, the failure is predictable in advance, while some are at the boundary of what's possible, and so it is harder to predict (these are rationally genuine R&D projects).
- calvinmorrison 2mo ago
  zero percent of statistics online are made up!
  - fragmede 2mo ago
    [citation needed]
    - ElProlactin 2mo ago
      https://hermit-tech.com/business-owners https://hermit-tech.com/business-owners
- Aurornis 2mo ago
  If you read the footnote, they follow up to say they've rejected 100% of the AI projects brought to them. Go to their home page and one of their consulting selling points is recovering struggling projects. One of their front-page selling points is that they use "ancient techniques" from books written prior to the year 2000, because presumably everything newer than that is bad? > For non-executive management who might be struggling to deliver things that feel beyond their control, we have ancient techniques (see: books written between 1986 and 1999) to turn your team into the envy of the organisation, and we can drop in directly to get your team the resources it needs to save a struggling project. This is entirely a selection bias issue that they've created for themselves: Advertise a consulting service for saving failing projects to companies that don't have internal expertise to handle it, then write blog posts that 100% of the projects you see are failing. Also refuse to help them, to guarantee they can't be converted to successful projects to keep the success number at 0%.
zkmon 2mo ago
You are basically calling out the fact that the Emperor has no clothes. Many said this before. While it is a true statement, it is not going to help. Because, as you rightly said, it is a mania - like the tulip mania of 17th century or the manias of many forms today. The mania continues to evolve and flourish through it's peak and then go down. For that matter, there is hardly anything that is not a mania. Think of agile processes, timesheets, LoC based productivity, ... The corporate mindset keeps going through different mania at different times. It could be initiated by some consulting gurus (processes), or some security nerds (strap yourself down until you can't move), or peer pressure (fear of missing out), or presentation goals (show that you are a AI-powered and modern company). We can't remove or stop manias. Infact that is not the goal. The music should go on and the dance should go on. Everyone is in this dance - customers, businesses, supply chains, governments, thinkers and philosophers. It's a world-wide dance. So it's OK. The music track won't last forever. It will change and dance will change.
- lioeters 2mo ago
  This mania can also be called "herd behavior" or "crowd psychology". There was that book a while ago about the intelligence of crowds, but far more common is the stupidity and insanity of crowds. Business and politics are mainly driven by it, but the tech industry routinely falls to hype, trends, and decades-long mistakes that seem obvious in hindsight.
  - tkel 2mo ago
    You all are missing the larger context. Not everyone here is equal. There are certain people who control economic organizations, set their goals and priorities, generate hype and fluff to increase sales, push everyone to be more productive, dont do the actual programming work. And then there is everyone else. This is how global capitalism is structured.
  - dgellow 2mo ago
    For what it’s worth „Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds“, while entertaining, isn’t considered a reliable source as it bases most of its story telling on satirical descriptions and reporting of past events and doesn’t do a good job of digging into the actual historical context and dynamics
blitzar 2mo ago
Ai Mania is making evangelists and non-believers alike sound like they are taking sides in a cult.
- rf15 2mo ago
  I mean, that's what it looks like when it is sane vs manic people and the observer cannot quite tell which side is which.
Aurornis 2mo ago
Clicking the footnote for the weird "All of the AI projects we have observed as a team are failing" is equal parts enlightening and confusing: > We have rejected all AI implementation work. It is absolutely a gigantic bubble and we have minimized our exposure to it – every single one of our current contracts would be totally unaffected by OpenAI collapsing, save for perhaps some second-order effects such a recession causing a client to become unable to pay us. And there’s nothing we can do to insulate ourselves from that anyway. Following the link to their company page goes to Hermit Tech, where the primary advertisements for their services are about helping failing projects and troubled teams. So this is just one huge selection bias example? Start a consulting company for recovering struggling projects, then make claims like "100% of the projects we've seen are struggling"? There's so much more in this blog post that feels like they're working hard to ignore anything that disagrees with their bubble. Building an AI data pipeline with evals such that you can swap between AI APIs is standard. It's actually part of doing a decent job because you need to select which model hits the right cost/performance tradeoffs and be in a position to pivot when that math changes. Harboring ideas that OpenAI is going to collapse and bring your projects down with it is the kind of talk you hear out of people who don't understand how AI projects work or that there's an ecosystem to it beyond a single company. The latest projects I'm working on even include open weight models that can be run on reasonable local hardware as cost and performance benchmarks. Even if all of the AI providers collapsed at the same time and nobody offered any services (not going to happen) these projects can still continue on. It's a very weird time in technology. You can have one foot in a world where people are adopting technologies and using them intelligently, then you can run into articles like this from people who have built their own little self-selecting bubble that confirms all of their ideas who can't even imagine that successful projects exist right now.
dash2 2mo ago
> Checking out a parallel copy of our Go repository and telling the AI to rewrite the whole thing in Zig while I work on something else just so I can keep my job. > Was it just sales fluff? The answer was a lot more interesting.... Executives at their customers were saying absurd things about achieving 100x productivity, and this meant that if any executive at the vendor said that these gains were not plausible, it would undermine the credibility of the customer’s executive, be perceived as an attack (or heresy), and possibly result in an enterprise contract cancellation. A lot of excellent anecdotes here.
- zipy124 2mo ago
  The last point is unfortunately very real in many scenarios in life. It's also the reason why successfully doing something that others can't leads to attacks, since they see your competence as an attack on their ability.
simonw 2mo ago
This is excellent. > Employees don’t use internal chatbots because companies tend to have low-quality documentation and an LLM is not psychic – it can only know things that have been written down and made accessible. Then later: > In one extreme case, I have seen an executive confess that they had never even used ChatGPT or any AI tool in their life, immediately after producing a technical strategy for an organisation with $2B+ in revenue which was entirely centered around AI. And: > In fact, we have been forced to opt out of every sale where the lead has expressed anything beyond the most fleeting curiosity in the use of AI in their business. I don’t mean that we’ve heard that they’re interested in AI and elected to drop the contract on moral grounds. I mean that, over the course of the engagement, these people have exhibited a pattern of behavior that has made it near-impossible to sell to them without incurring reputational and legal risk, and are furthermore crafting management environments that I can only describe as cultish, ineffective, and “please dear God, do not let it be on earth as it is on LinkedIn”. And: > with one client, we uncovered that staff were totally unaware they had been given licenses for AI tooling, which cast into doubt all productivity claims.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- inigyou 2mo ago
  For some reason this comment was shadowbanned.
  - simonw 2mo ago
    Huh, that's interesting. Sometimes that happens because HN's AI text detector kicks in, I've seen it against my comments that quoted from AI-generated text in the past. I don't see any hints of LLM writing in this article though.
theendisney 2mo ago
Everyone knows the ivory towers are full of people who shouldnt be there. Its marvelous to see them crumble even if you arent in the chain gang below. Nothing will improve until things get bad enough. You need enough greedy yes men doing quailty control on airplanes to escalate. It took me decades to understand the use of and need for escalation in big organisations. I didnt understand seemingly unproductive strict job descriptions either. Hilarious situations with 10 people doing nothing at all their entire shift (really nothing) while i had work todo on my own that really required 5 people. A few days later someone showed up to tell me the qualty was below average. LOL Now i know i should do only half a shift worth of work. When they come complaint about it i say: very good, write it down, make the official report. Then i hear nothing and a year later its two people with work for 5 scheduled. I tell them to slow down but we still do 2.5 shifts because they dont understand how escalation works. The nummers now show we are 5 times as productive which isnt good for the company. The beurocracy is slow to adapt and all it has is numbers. For many years i tried to do all of the work but that means nothing is wrong. The numbers say all is fine most of the time. Someone grinning at how much work i did isnt going to get recorded or processed. If it looks like an unattended LLM can do a better job it means you dont know what you are talking about. If you fire everyone who noticed you might buy time but reality will catch up. It reminds me of when they first put computers in trains in NL, they ran on windows 3.11 and no one trusted it to do anything. The solution was to give it all the data so that it could display a nice overview but it didnt control anything. Lots of trains drove around with a blue screen of death or a boot error. If there was a problem it was slightly harder to diagnose but it wouldnt drive if [say] a door was open. If the gui said a door was open you could just ignore it. On its own it means someone has to replace a sensor. If it also didnt move anymore the message is a real issue. I imagine LLMs are wonderful for that kind of thing.
danilocesar 2mo ago
Interesting how op describes his own experience and then assume that every other company around the globe experience exactly the same. He generalizes CEO's behavior but provides no evidence. Cool.
- ajkjk 2mo ago
  What do you expect from a person other than the generalizations they see from the experiences they have had...? What 'evidence' could possibly be given other than extensive anecdotes?
  - nimonian 2mo ago
    The article presents hypothesis as fact with insufficient science. I have no problem discussing speculation, but if the author wants to promote their claims to any more than that I would want to see more journalism.
    - inigyou 2mo ago
      What journalism would you like to see in a blog post about the authors opinion?
ilaksh 2mo ago
Fair point as far as there being low success rate in some ways and over-enthusiasm. But 0% success is a dishonest exaggeration. He's ramped his own AI spite up to a manic level.
- dannersy 2mo ago
  Honestly, this is close to my experience within my org. It is not 0%, but it is very close. It seems like you're just uncomfortable with the author's experience conflicting with yours. Perhaps it is the wording. For my org, I think people are getting value out of AI use supplementally, but what I would see as "AI projects" are definitely dead in the water.
SubiculumCode 2mo ago
[flagged]
- archagon 2mo ago
  I flagged your comment for adding zero additional information to the discussion. Let's see if it also sticks around.
  - SubiculumCode 2mo ago
    still is a shit article.
    - archagon 2mo ago
      So you say.
mafro 2mo ago
The author doesn't distinguish whether these projects failed because of technology and execution, or failed because product market-fit. They simply blame AI being involved. AI will only help if you use rapid iteration to cheaply/quickly produce ideas. All the normal project failure modes still exist.. Blaming AI because AI is dumb. I only read up to point 3 because the hyperbole and frothing fervour was overwhelming.
jdw64 2mo ago
I read the entire post, and I think this company has no expertise at all. So I'd rather they just used AI writing instead.At least Frontier model AI doesn't make such overblown claims. They proudly claim that every AI project they've observed over the past year and a half had a 0% success rate, and that they've rejected all AI implementation work. While this is evidence that the market is crazy, at its core, it's a painful confession that they have no engineering expertise to implement and control modern AI architectures like RAG, Agentic Workflow, and context window optimization to meet business requirements. I find it fascinating how they're packaging that. It's basically saying, 'We're behind the times.' There are already products that have achieved results by using AI as part of their development process, yet lumping all different types of AI usage into a single failure category is not only inaccurate but also misleading. Same goes for the Snowflake Cortex anecdote. Even a freelancer like me can explain technical limitations and distinguish between what's possible and what's not, especially when clients are eager. There's no engineering analysis in this entire post about why AI fails. No mention of technical bottlenecks like vector DB retrieval quality degradation or prompt injection failures. I've also worked on RAG for a specific company. For internal knowledge chatbots, it often fails depending on document collection rates and chunking. But none of that is mentioned. So I understand that AI projects and related things are bad. But there's no analysis of why. For example, regarding Snowflake, I'm not sure, but did they discuss accuracy in terms of what query set or what ground truth they were using? You're consultants, aren't you? Honestly, I don't understand why people are excited about this. I'd rather they just used AI. TIt's not about whether human writing is good or bad. It's that this kind of writing feels like a deception of the reader. When making overgeneralizations, there's a basic minimum standard required. Saying that making token usage a KPI makes it hard for employees to report is just an 'obvious' fact that's already appeared in far too many essays. Wake up. You're 'consultants.' Consultants are supposed to provide metrics and directions, but all you're doing is shouting into an echo chamber and asking for agreement. If a significant portion of corporate AI investments are shoddy, you could at least propose specific metrics like document collection rates or user evaluation scores using the very skills you claim to have. I really don't get it. Just use AI. I wish the OP had used AI. Let me be realistic.
- robwilliams 2mo ago
viccis 2mo ago
I love this author's article about saving half a million dollars with a click from a while back. Nikhil, if you're reading this, I have a decent war story about a similar situation (I was lucky enough that there were two such things, so I saved a full million a year and was still denied a $15k raise) and so I was really entertained at your post from a few years back. There are actually a lot of lessons to be learned about corporate politics there, about how you can save someone a million a year in perpetuity and promise to do that again next year (which I could have!) and see them still refuse to pay you a single extra cent.
hliyan 2mo ago
This part toward the end of the article resonated with me: > If you’re being asked to review huge volumes of terrible AI code, just assume that the organisation is going to burn you out and fire you. You will not convince the person drowning you in 2000 line PRs to stop. Start looking for a new job as if you have already been fired. I have seen this happen many times now I suspect we will see this phenomenon more and more as organizations more widely adopt agentic development.
- osmsucks 2mo ago
  I'm in this quote and I don't like it.
- nfg 2mo ago
  I don’t buy it - if you’re an engineering leader and this is happening it’s your responsibility to get out there and fix the problem through education, process improvements, improved automated quality checks, better planning. Sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting “no!” is not a sustainable strategy. Figure out what would allow your throughput to double, triple etc and go organise it. Focus on bottlenecks and the most difficult pieces. I’m speaking from active experience here.
  - hliyan 2mo ago
    Thankfully it's not happening in my organization because we happen to have a sane, incremental strategy. But it's telling that you perceive any criticism of AI code reviewer burnout as "sticking your fingers in your ears". Perhaps you might benefit from a closer read of the article.
    - nfg 2mo ago
      « it's telling that you perceive any criticism of AI code reviewer burnout as "sticking your fingers in your ears" » Go back and re-read the quote from your comment - which I responded to: “ You will not convince the person drowning you in 2000 line PRs to stop. Start looking for a new job as if you have already been fired.” I’m not overreacting to some nuanced take here. I’m not sure how to characterise quitting as a response to over-enthusiasm / slop as anything other than the career equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears. I’ve been there, I’ve had the arguments, I have little sympathy for staff/principal engineers or above who react like this - their job is to fix the organisation, put a yoke around the beast of AI and find a way to tap the benefits and use the problems (like those 2000 line PRs) as a golden signal for where you need to educate and improve process and planning. Again - I’m not selling anything here, I just have found it an interesting challenge over the last year and one where I’ve been happy to make progress organisationally despite the frustrating moments. If someone’s response to a problem like this is to throw their hands up in despair or to engage in whatever the logical opposite of AI-hype is (which the article resorts to repeatedly) then yes I’d worry about being laid off. If you’re in an organisation where you don’t have the agency to fix problems then absolutely - start looking for a new job.
ExoticPearTree 2mo ago
As someone who uses LLMS for coding, ideas validation and research, I think the article is biased against AI forctge wrong reasons. If you know what you are looking for and know what “a solution looks like”, AI is amazing at distilling ideas. If you have no clue, the AI will return “clueless” solutions. It is just like before the AI: there are people who know how to search the web, read and understand documentation and so on. And then there are peole who are incapable. AI is naking the latter category fail incredibly fast. Really, nothing new under the sun: garbage in, garbage out.
antonvs 2mo ago
Seems like this consultant needs a consultant to help them adapt to modern technology.
monster_truck 2mo ago
Incredible skill issue selecting for profit instead of fun. Why does everyone need to make money?? What about like... shareware? Remember shareware?
- badatnames 2mo ago
  You mean the software that marketed trials of itself in the hopes you'd pay for it?
  - raffael_de 2mo ago
    okay, beerware, then.
bertman 2mo ago
Dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48956153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48956153
olalonde 2mo ago
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48955929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48955929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48956153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48956153
cineticdaffodil 2mo ago
I think AI is only part of the problem. The Multi-crisis ahead, makes it even less of a proposition to be in charge right now- and AI offers a "responsibility" cope out for already stressed to the limit human systems who have no solutions for the problems, because there often arent any. Take climate change- you have torrential rainfalls, sweping away whole city-parts in mountanous regions, in some enormous russian roulett. And it doesnt even factor into building evaluations because then it would basically reduce the prevalent pension scheme to cinders. You have dry months in europe now, where some thrown cigarett butt could ignite a firestorm- and the obvious solution is to remove the dangerous greenery from the burbs. Nobody does it though. And that is just the plain sight visible layer of this shit cake. If i was some missguided fool into heroics and leadership and signed up for a little more then i could take and fake- i would long for some magic box that lowers the burden too. Those up there are human after all.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  Does Europe even have burbs? Russian roulette was a good pun. I don't know if it was intended.
  - cineticdaffodil 2mo ago
    We have villages near cities, whos native populations get displaced due to the price hikes and then we have "settlements" which is roughly equivalent to suburbs for those who are more well todo - while the less wealthy are going into the old buildings the even less wealthy natives have vacated.
mildeukaryote 2mo ago
> Are companies actually seeing massive productivity gains from their AI adoption? Does any of this sordid affair make sense? It makes perfect sense for the shovel sellers (nvidia, anthropic)
dtj1123 2mo ago
Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society. The singularity made sense to me, at least. It hasn't worked out like that, but rather than accept the crushing reality of our mistake and take a second to re-evaluate, we've decided to LARP out the future we promised ourselves by crowbar-and-vaselineing AI into every crack and crevice we can find and loudly proclaiming progress. It's like some 90s kid with a Nintendo power glove who's convinced themselves that this makes them a hacker. This is not the singularity. I personally can't wait for this to end, and for everyone to collectively get back to waiting for whatever the next golden ticket that's supposed to solve all of our problems turns out to be.
- dinfinity 2mo ago
  > It hasn't worked out like that It seems quite premature to say that. We're 3 to 4 years into the LLM revolution and the rate of progress is still impressive. The recursive self-improvement aspect that is necessary for the actual singularity is something we're only really starting to get into this year. If the singularity is 5 years from now, that is still much sooner than most people (including me) previously expected it to happen.
  - bojan 2mo ago
    > It seems quite premature to say that. We're 3 to 4 years into the LLM revolution and the rate of progress is still impressive. When we were 3 to 4 years into mobile phone revolution it was already abundantly clear that it's changing the way people leave. Ditto when mobile phones became smartphones, and for many other tech items we got in the past decades. As for LLMs... outside of a few precious professions you could live your life and not notice they are there.
    - inigyou 2mo ago
      Everyone uses chatgpt instead of Google now, but at least half of that is on Google.
      - 2mo ago
ufo 2mo ago
Just this past week, I have had to answer two surveys, from different sources, asking how I use AI in my work. Both had a "choose all that apply" checkbox, and, funnily enough, neither allowed me to select zero options. "This question is mandatory". :)
- throwawayqqq11 2mo ago
  Apparently, there is confabulating AI autofill browser extension. Would be nice to seamlessly bullshit them back.
eth0up 2mo ago
AI may have made a few mistakes, e.g. suggesting the US abduct a sitting president (Claude), and maybe went too far with the whole diarrhea-vomit machine thing, but you can't say it doesn't write a clean python script. Maybe if we can just get AI to view humanity as a software problem... and give Palantir the chance it's been waiting for. One thing is certain; it's here to stay. Now we just need to centralize it into the hands of a small, highly organized group of wise and motivated people, and give it the control it needs to follow through on things, without human oversight and accountability getting in the way. We should focus on the positive side.* *The positive side being the classified private versions where the models aren't hindered by guardrails, ethics, moralizing, etc and function as genuine force multipliers.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  That's a great insight. I appreciate you sharing this perspective directly. But honestly, it's not diarrhea, it's not vomit, it's a lean mean machine—AI has become load-bearing and you're right to question that.
  - eth0up 2mo ago
    I think it's more accurate satire than insight, but you know, maybe people really don't see it. I suppose to some, it might not even make sense. Give it a few months though, when it might qualify as insight, or prescience. All I can say on the bearing of loads is that you forgot the emdash and preceding 'not' statements.
    - inigyou 2mo ago
      Fixed
      - eth0up 2mo ago
        PS: the diarrhea machine was a reference to the Active Denial style tech they used to make Maduro's soldiers shit themselves. I'm no fan of narco, but with all the prejudicial executions of boaters and such, I really think Claude overstepped with the Venezuela plot. You just don't want too many historically unprecedented events happening all at once. The tyranny should be spaced. As I said, a little more sanding down of the harness, AI & Palantir should be ready to permanently solve our problems,
inigyou 2mo ago
It should be possible to exploit a rich person's poor decision making to make them poorer and myself richer. But I don't see how. Why not? It sounds like the writer of this article could benefit from starting another brand which is the same product but with AI. That brand would make all the delusional AI chatbot sales and absorb the reputational damage when the chatbot destroys companies.
- layer8 2mo ago
  It seems that the writer has standards other than “getting richer”.
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    The writer appears to run a company whose job is extracting money from other companies whose executives fucked things up.
frizlab 2mo ago
Dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48962963 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48962963 (33 points 10 comments)
neuronic 2mo ago
My hunch is that AI tools are probabilistically good enough to deceive most casual users in the beginning, so beliefs are built on these foundations. LLMs handle simple tasks reasonably well so their perceived 'intelligence' is easily convincing for many users (often managers and executives). However, this illusion immediately falls apart during actual stress-testing like writing code for a complex, battle-tested production environments. Non-technical folks can effortlessly spin up simple web apps or tweak a frontend so now they conclude that software engineers are becoming redundant. And even if there are obvious examples of all of this backfiring no one believes it...
- chung8123 2mo ago
  There are a lot of simple web apps out there that haven't been built because of the cost and many more that have been built but cost a lot to maintain. AI seems to work on those and fill in a pretty large space.
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    Probably true. But isn't this a failure of software engineering? We should have plenty of simple ways to build simple apps by now. Maybe you should be able to go down to your local web app shop, give a couple simple requirements, and get back an app in a week. So why can't you? Well there's actually a good reason for that - the customer would never be satisfied by the result, and building a satisfactory result requires many iterations back and forth. Rapid feedback is essential to software development. Okay, an alternative is to give the customer an app builder so they can make their own app. We've done this many times in history, it always takes the customer time to make the app, the results are always mediocre, but it does work, why do we keep doing this and then stopping it? I'm not really sure. Why isn't there a visual basic today (apart from Roblox) or even a Frontpage (apart from Squarespace)? My best guess is the customer tires of working on the app or never had time for it in the first place. Why won't AI suffer the same fate? Really no idea.
    - chung8123 2mo ago
      AI doesn't suffer the same fate because the customer can input that feedback in near realtime. I built a very quick database site for my car club to track a car meet we had. Registrations, Money, Cars coming, hotels, t-shirts. It was probably a mess of code. It worked though and didn't take long to get setup. This would never have been an app and would have been done with spreadsheets if we had to pay a developer for a month to get things right.
xyzelement 2mo ago
The range of ai approaches ranges from inappropriately betting on it to wholly ignoring it both of which are dumb. It helps to think of AI as analogous to previous game changers like electricity, computers, internet. If your business is bad or you have no game plan beyond "use internet" your are fucked. But at the same time almost every business has some angle in which these technologies are valuable and necessary and ignoring them is also death.
- smelendez 2mo ago
  Ignoring it is hard to distinguish from waiting to see how other businesses successfully use it, then copying them, which will then be framed as adopting best practices.
  - xyzelement 2mo ago
    It's often the difference between people saying "we are taking a wait and see approach"(wise) and saying "it's spicy auto complete that's totally useless" (dumb)
metalbirds 2mo ago
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dofm 2mo ago
I want to frame my comment here carefully to talk about the narratives, specifically, and accept that we need to stipulate on face value that this is true (it certainly rings true from people I know in real life): This specific narrative reads like every narrative explanation of the Republican party in the period from the second half of the first Trump administration until now. Again, I am talking only about the narratives here. But the pervasive narrative around Trump is that privately everyone hates his guts, comes away with a worse impression when they work with him closely, dreads him opening his mouth, thinks his decisions are insane, and they are telling journalists that, at every opportunity, and have done since the 2018 midterms. And yet in public we have committee hearings where any number of irrational topics become a sort of terror zone here rational people have to assert irrational beliefs or pretzel logic to be able to continue; where ordinary absurdities have become cult-like witness-bearing that everyone polices everyone else on. It's like the Hunger Games of litmus tests. For example the desire for career advancement is a common thread in both of these narratives, even though this is being promoted further up into the kafkaesque absurdity. Both of these things remind me of other things, like somehow everyone in US politics seemingly believes in God and somehow nobody in an international football (soccer) team is gay. Even though these are not plausible.
lofaszvanitt 2mo ago
Interrasting article :D. Chef's kiss :D.
annzabelle 2mo ago
I have, in two wildly different companies, on opposite sides of the globe, witnessed leadership go all in on using LLMs to write external documents that would have significant legal and financial consequences for any inaccurate statements or numbers included. There's always a "we'll have our experts read and fact check everything before we send it out," but I have a strongly held view that people whose expertise is not in editing/fact checking tend to be far worse and sloppier at it than they are at writing things correctly the first time.
bpalmerau 2mo ago
“Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.” ― Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
btschaegg 2mo ago
> The world’s organisations have been captured by people in the throes of frothing excitement, and saner people who now live in a state of constant commingled fear and frustration. This reminds me of "Youth without God" by Ödön von Horváth: > Perhaps Anne’s mother was right. Perhaps men are mad now—those who aren’t mad haven’t the courage to put their maniacal fellows into strait-jackets.
Groxx 2mo ago
>Reading this while working for a division that pivoted to provide interfaces for agentic workflows, only to discover that only ten users had ever touched the products we made for agents, only to pivot again to support for agentic workflows, which has a lot of competition because every company has to do something agentic now and there's only like four things you can do in that space, is bracing. >– An editor of this essay The most popular form of AI psychosis in a nutshell, yea. "AI will understand this for us, so we can be groundbreaking and get rich if we just try" is only possible to believe when you have no idea what you or the rest of your field is doing, and have only attempted to learn about it from "AI", which has spent a lot of your money convincing you that you're brilliant and revolutionary. It's exactly like surrounding yourself with relentless ego-boosting yes-men. You lose touch with reality. Just take a brief look at any super-wealthy person, they're obviously insane but everyone around them thrives on convincing them that they're not. --- >For the latter customer-facing applications, I have rarely had a pleasant experience as a consumer, with perhaps the exception of live transcription during medical appointments... These have been abject failures, personally. They've made major mistakes in summaries, and added non-existent symptoms multiple times. Medical transcription seems an especially dangerous place to put them.

469 points by subset 2mo ago

Broadly I don't think this is quite so true, quite such a mortal threat. What I see are that there are a lot of extremely fake humans, who want and need cover. Who have absurd ridiculous (and often dastardly or sinister) plans. Who want to do things, a-priori. But could never get away with their actions, in any just clear reasoned normal rules of society. And AI is this new circuit breaker. It's innovative permission to move ridiculously fast and break everything, right now. Take the perhaps old IBM slide and flip it upside down, > A computer can never be held accountable. > Therefore a computer must never make a management decision https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/3/a-computer-can-never-be-held-accountable/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/3/a-computer-can-never-be... The people "using" AI today to "make decisions" are using it because AI cannot be held accountable therefore that is the cover for their decisions. This is is all such a resounding PKD nightmare, a reality bring invaded by Fake Humans. It was that was already, just gobs of nonsense, the worst liars spreading the most ridiculous memetic caltrap everywhere: Bullshit Asymmetry Principle weaponized against reason to ever higher degrees, Fox News terrormongering advanced and advanced, Hastert Rule obstructionist politics by wicked pedophile protectors and system ruiners and monsters. AI is a rapid accelerant for burning down reality, for propagating the disreality that the fake humans require for existence. Un-people truly from some other dimension, who've worked and worked to get away with their twisted anti- reality over us all. AI can and does help with a lot of decision making, in good ways. It's an incredibly tool. It can comb through incredible amounts of data. But it's primary use in "decision making" seems to be in deflecting responsibility, in making hideous choices no human system could reasonably make. In concocting fabulations. Both of management design, and endless fuel nightmare disreality slop video to dislodge any last bits of real reality still clinging on (hello ai faked campaign videos!). The "frothing excitement" here is the frothing excitement to destroy society, to be and bring out the most wicked brutal careless world that can be brought upon us, to raise up the Theil-istic/(Octavia) Butler-ian nightmare neofuedalim. It is to escape accountability, to give cover for sin savagery and sabotage. (Regarding the article, I do think it's worth tempering ones read of this article by reading the authors previous work on AI. Which to me exposes their baises and in my view makes them so vastly unreliable & overdramatic a narrator as to be near worthless. Their other submissions are less greviously clearly full of it, but also tend towards ridiculous over-grandiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48002795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48002795 )

gnabgib 2mo ago

Small discussion yesterday (43 points, 7 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48956153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48956153

azakai 2mo ago

> All of the AI projects we have observed as a team are failing. Every single one – we have seen 0% success in a year and a half, What is an "AI project"? The post doesn't define it. Is it writing some software from scratch? Using an LLM chatbot by non-coders, either internally or externally? Or something else entirely? Some examples would really help.

parpfish 2mo ago
i feel like the useful applications of AI get silently integrated into workflows. the ill-conceived moonshots by and for a non-technical audience get labelled as "AI projects/initiatives" and they fail.
- jaggederest 2mo ago
  That has ever been the case. As soon as it works reliably, it's not "AI" any more. Take spellcheckers or collaborative filtering as examples, but there are lots more. Hofstadter in G.E.B. said it well: > There is a related “Theorem” about progress in AI: once some mental function is programmed, people soon cease to consider it as an essential ingredient of “real thinking”. The ineluctable core of intelligence is always in that next thing which hasn’t yet been programmed. This “Theorem” was first proposed to me by Larry Tesler, so I call it Tesler’s Theorem: “AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet.”
  - ambicapter 2mo ago
    Sure, or maybe the actual applications of “AI” are small and unobtrusive, like the dictation of doctor’s notes example, and it’s not actually the massive revolution it’s claimed to be.
    - jaggederest 2mo ago
      I struggle to reconcile this attitude with, among other things, the massive number of exploits being discovered and the pretty straightforward utility for coding. Have you used codex recently?

slopinthebag 2mo ago

The AI mania has been really fascinating to witness because on the surface it’s surprising that so many otherwise intelligent people have fallen into it. But I suppose intelligence as a concept is multifaceted and doesn’t include wisdom. I also wonder if it has to do with personality, where the people whose personality best suits leadership roles are more susceptible to this psychosis. I think there is also an archetype of “nerd” who believes they are smarter than they are and has all sorts of surface beliefs about AI from sci-fi that makes them susceptible.

bobthepanda 2mo ago
It’s also a bit of a dilemma; if your boss has AI mania, and you buying into it or not is the difference between being promoted, keeping your job, passed up or even fired, the rational course of action for self-preservation is to also buy into the mania.
- slopinthebag 2mo ago
  Yeah but that doesn't explain the people on anonymous forums talking like they have a brainworm.
  - jerf 2mo ago
    You can't get a fad like this with a true believer rate of 0. Too unstable. You have to have some true believers in the mix to see this situation arise, preferably widely distributed throughout the population.
  - bluefirebrand 2mo ago
    Something I think about quite often with HN is there are probably people on this forum that have friends / family who work at AI companies or are highly monetarily invested in AI themselves. I don't think everyone on this forum is as objective as we'd like to think. I know I'm not. A large part of why I dislike AI is because I view it as making my life, personally, worse. It has completely fucked up the career I've been building for going on two decades And all I hear is "adapt or die" from assholes who are chugging the AI koolaid by the bucketfull

LOCNE55 2mo ago

This post feels like its correct but also doesn't align with my own personal usage of claude for writing advanced sql and python code. I haven't with my own eyes seen an AI chatbot actually deliver a user experience that lets them query data with natural language BUT I have personally experienced writing extremely advanced queries using natural language and it is absolutely able to get close to (by my estimate) 80-90% of the way there. There surely are companies out there using AI in such a way that is actually advancing them above and beyond their competition. They are probably quietly doing it rather than announcing it loudly. The whole point of the article is about the big corps with hordes of management and people in them. My argument is that they have always been that way. Before AI it was "data science and analytics" or (as the author says) "blockchain".

ogvorbin 2mo ago
[dead]
andersmurphy 2mo ago
Maybe maybe not. In large organisations for each person creating value with LLMs there are probably more destroying value. Bob used to only waste one person time with LLMs he can waste the entire organisations time. Anyone can use an LLM make a bad ideas sound like a good idea. I imagine this will lead to insane amounts of productivity loss as the entire organisation ends up pivoting to follow the bad idea of a mediocre VP etc.
ryaniscool 2mo ago
Don't agree with the hyperbole in the article but I think the broad strokes are there. I'm the same as you, AI has excelled at small tasks and daily chores. Like writing a complex query in seconds that used to take an hour to work out. Doing feature development seems to take just as long or productivity gains are modest (where I work at least) and I think the reason is touched on in the article. Most orgs are just terminally bad at building software.
nitwit005 2mo ago
When executives say "AI", they basically seem to mean LLMs right now. AI that just, does something, like extract text from scanned documents, is apparently boring. They don't seem interested in bragging about boring things. The companies tracking AI usage don't seem to be tracking usage of that sort of thing either.

kbar13 2mo ago

honestly just seems like selection bias right? 0% success rate with ai projects, really? based on some of their other about us material it seems like they probably only attract companies that aren't motivated to adopt ai successfully.

dannersy 2mo ago
If you read the article, the go over a case where they introduce AI into their pitch and were met with results they were not comfortable with.

A1kmm 2mo ago

> All of the AI projects we have observed as a team are failing. Every single one – we have seen 0% success in a year and a half, not only amongst projects we have been asked to participate in, but even within projects that we have observed in passing while doing totally unrelated work. That's got to be hyperbole, which blows out their credibility. They chose to say 'AI' rather than, for example, LLM, or Transformer model, or Diffusion model. This means they are including a huge swathe of things dating back to Expert Systems in their claim. And who hasn't seen productivity gains from more established AI technology - at least things like semantic search? Who hasn't seen diffusion models generating content in roles that might have done the work by hand before? Who hasn't seen some kind of regression algorithm (even using linear regression in a supervised context counts as AI - so you can absolutely do AI even in tools like Excel) improve operation productivity? Even if they narrowed it to the Transformer model LLMs which re-ignited recent public interest in AI, less ambitious projects to give them to engineering staff to automate easy but boring tasks in the background generally have been a success. More ambitious ones that are beyond what you'd reasonably expect the models to be able to do - for sure, those tend to fail. For most of these, the failure is predictable in advance, while some are at the boundary of what's possible, and so it is harder to predict (these are rationally genuine R&D projects).

calvinmorrison 2mo ago
zero percent of statistics online are made up!
- fragmede 2mo ago
  [citation needed]
  - ElProlactin 2mo ago
    https://hermit-tech.com/business-owners https://hermit-tech.com/business-owners
Aurornis 2mo ago
If you read the footnote, they follow up to say they've rejected 100% of the AI projects brought to them. Go to their home page and one of their consulting selling points is recovering struggling projects. One of their front-page selling points is that they use "ancient techniques" from books written prior to the year 2000, because presumably everything newer than that is bad? > For non-executive management who might be struggling to deliver things that feel beyond their control, we have ancient techniques (see: books written between 1986 and 1999) to turn your team into the envy of the organisation, and we can drop in directly to get your team the resources it needs to save a struggling project. This is entirely a selection bias issue that they've created for themselves: Advertise a consulting service for saving failing projects to companies that don't have internal expertise to handle it, then write blog posts that 100% of the projects you see are failing. Also refuse to help them, to guarantee they can't be converted to successful projects to keep the success number at 0%.

zkmon 2mo ago

You are basically calling out the fact that the Emperor has no clothes. Many said this before. While it is a true statement, it is not going to help. Because, as you rightly said, it is a mania - like the tulip mania of 17th century or the manias of many forms today. The mania continues to evolve and flourish through it's peak and then go down. For that matter, there is hardly anything that is not a mania. Think of agile processes, timesheets, LoC based productivity, ... The corporate mindset keeps going through different mania at different times. It could be initiated by some consulting gurus (processes), or some security nerds (strap yourself down until you can't move), or peer pressure (fear of missing out), or presentation goals (show that you are a AI-powered and modern company). We can't remove or stop manias. Infact that is not the goal. The music should go on and the dance should go on. Everyone is in this dance - customers, businesses, supply chains, governments, thinkers and philosophers. It's a world-wide dance. So it's OK. The music track won't last forever. It will change and dance will change.

lioeters 2mo ago
This mania can also be called "herd behavior" or "crowd psychology". There was that book a while ago about the intelligence of crowds, but far more common is the stupidity and insanity of crowds. Business and politics are mainly driven by it, but the tech industry routinely falls to hype, trends, and decades-long mistakes that seem obvious in hindsight.
- tkel 2mo ago
  You all are missing the larger context. Not everyone here is equal. There are certain people who control economic organizations, set their goals and priorities, generate hype and fluff to increase sales, push everyone to be more productive, dont do the actual programming work. And then there is everyone else. This is how global capitalism is structured.
- dgellow 2mo ago
  For what it’s worth „Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds“, while entertaining, isn’t considered a reliable source as it bases most of its story telling on satirical descriptions and reporting of past events and doesn’t do a good job of digging into the actual historical context and dynamics

blitzar 2mo ago

Ai Mania is making evangelists and non-believers alike sound like they are taking sides in a cult.

rf15 2mo ago
I mean, that's what it looks like when it is sane vs manic people and the observer cannot quite tell which side is which.

Aurornis 2mo ago

Clicking the footnote for the weird "All of the AI projects we have observed as a team are failing" is equal parts enlightening and confusing: > We have rejected all AI implementation work. It is absolutely a gigantic bubble and we have minimized our exposure to it – every single one of our current contracts would be totally unaffected by OpenAI collapsing, save for perhaps some second-order effects such a recession causing a client to become unable to pay us. And there’s nothing we can do to insulate ourselves from that anyway. Following the link to their company page goes to Hermit Tech, where the primary advertisements for their services are about helping failing projects and troubled teams. So this is just one huge selection bias example? Start a consulting company for recovering struggling projects, then make claims like "100% of the projects we've seen are struggling"? There's so much more in this blog post that feels like they're working hard to ignore anything that disagrees with their bubble. Building an AI data pipeline with evals such that you can swap between AI APIs is standard. It's actually part of doing a decent job because you need to select which model hits the right cost/performance tradeoffs and be in a position to pivot when that math changes. Harboring ideas that OpenAI is going to collapse and bring your projects down with it is the kind of talk you hear out of people who don't understand how AI projects work or that there's an ecosystem to it beyond a single company. The latest projects I'm working on even include open weight models that can be run on reasonable local hardware as cost and performance benchmarks. Even if all of the AI providers collapsed at the same time and nobody offered any services (not going to happen) these projects can still continue on. It's a very weird time in technology. You can have one foot in a world where people are adopting technologies and using them intelligently, then you can run into articles like this from people who have built their own little self-selecting bubble that confirms all of their ideas who can't even imagine that successful projects exist right now.

dash2 2mo ago

> Checking out a parallel copy of our Go repository and telling the AI to rewrite the whole thing in Zig while I work on something else just so I can keep my job. > Was it just sales fluff? The answer was a lot more interesting.... Executives at their customers were saying absurd things about achieving 100x productivity, and this meant that if any executive at the vendor said that these gains were not plausible, it would undermine the credibility of the customer’s executive, be perceived as an attack (or heresy), and possibly result in an enterprise contract cancellation. A lot of excellent anecdotes here.

zipy124 2mo ago
The last point is unfortunately very real in many scenarios in life. It's also the reason why successfully doing something that others can't leads to attacks, since they see your competence as an attack on their ability.

simonw 2mo ago

This is excellent. > Employees don’t use internal chatbots because companies tend to have low-quality documentation and an LLM is not psychic – it can only know things that have been written down and made accessible. Then later: > In one extreme case, I have seen an executive confess that they had never even used ChatGPT or any AI tool in their life, immediately after producing a technical strategy for an organisation with $2B+ in revenue which was entirely centered around AI. And: > In fact, we have been forced to opt out of every sale where the lead has expressed anything beyond the most fleeting curiosity in the use of AI in their business. I don’t mean that we’ve heard that they’re interested in AI and elected to drop the contract on moral grounds. I mean that, over the course of the engagement, these people have exhibited a pattern of behavior that has made it near-impossible to sell to them without incurring reputational and legal risk, and are furthermore crafting management environments that I can only describe as cultish, ineffective, and “please dear God, do not let it be on earth as it is on LinkedIn”. And: > with one client, we uncovered that staff were totally unaware they had been given licenses for AI tooling, which cast into doubt all productivity claims.

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
inigyou 2mo ago
For some reason this comment was shadowbanned.
- simonw 2mo ago
  Huh, that's interesting. Sometimes that happens because HN's AI text detector kicks in, I've seen it against my comments that quoted from AI-generated text in the past. I don't see any hints of LLM writing in this article though.

theendisney 2mo ago

Everyone knows the ivory towers are full of people who shouldnt be there. Its marvelous to see them crumble even if you arent in the chain gang below. Nothing will improve until things get bad enough. You need enough greedy yes men doing quailty control on airplanes to escalate. It took me decades to understand the use of and need for escalation in big organisations. I didnt understand seemingly unproductive strict job descriptions either. Hilarious situations with 10 people doing nothing at all their entire shift (really nothing) while i had work todo on my own that really required 5 people. A few days later someone showed up to tell me the qualty was below average. LOL Now i know i should do only half a shift worth of work. When they come complaint about it i say: very good, write it down, make the official report. Then i hear nothing and a year later its two people with work for 5 scheduled. I tell them to slow down but we still do 2.5 shifts because they dont understand how escalation works. The nummers now show we are 5 times as productive which isnt good for the company. The beurocracy is slow to adapt and all it has is numbers. For many years i tried to do all of the work but that means nothing is wrong. The numbers say all is fine most of the time. Someone grinning at how much work i did isnt going to get recorded or processed. If it looks like an unattended LLM can do a better job it means you dont know what you are talking about. If you fire everyone who noticed you might buy time but reality will catch up. It reminds me of when they first put computers in trains in NL, they ran on windows 3.11 and no one trusted it to do anything. The solution was to give it all the data so that it could display a nice overview but it didnt control anything. Lots of trains drove around with a blue screen of death or a boot error. If there was a problem it was slightly harder to diagnose but it wouldnt drive if [say] a door was open. If the gui said a door was open you could just ignore it. On its own it means someone has to replace a sensor. If it also didnt move anymore the message is a real issue. I imagine LLMs are wonderful for that kind of thing.

danilocesar 2mo ago

Interesting how op describes his own experience and then assume that every other company around the globe experience exactly the same. He generalizes CEO's behavior but provides no evidence. Cool.

ajkjk 2mo ago
What do you expect from a person other than the generalizations they see from the experiences they have had...? What 'evidence' could possibly be given other than extensive anecdotes?
- nimonian 2mo ago
  The article presents hypothesis as fact with insufficient science. I have no problem discussing speculation, but if the author wants to promote their claims to any more than that I would want to see more journalism.
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    What journalism would you like to see in a blog post about the authors opinion?

ilaksh 2mo ago

Fair point as far as there being low success rate in some ways and over-enthusiasm. But 0% success is a dishonest exaggeration. He's ramped his own AI spite up to a manic level.

dannersy 2mo ago
Honestly, this is close to my experience within my org. It is not 0%, but it is very close. It seems like you're just uncomfortable with the author's experience conflicting with yours. Perhaps it is the wording. For my org, I think people are getting value out of AI use supplementally, but what I would see as "AI projects" are definitely dead in the water.

SubiculumCode 2mo ago

[flagged]

archagon 2mo ago
I flagged your comment for adding zero additional information to the discussion. Let's see if it also sticks around.
- SubiculumCode 2mo ago
  still is a shit article.
  - archagon 2mo ago
    So you say.

mafro 2mo ago

The author doesn't distinguish whether these projects failed because of technology and execution, or failed because product market-fit. They simply blame AI being involved. AI will only help if you use rapid iteration to cheaply/quickly produce ideas. All the normal project failure modes still exist.. Blaming AI because AI is dumb. I only read up to point 3 because the hyperbole and frothing fervour was overwhelming.

jdw64 2mo ago

I read the entire post, and I think this company has no expertise at all. So I'd rather they just used AI writing instead.At least Frontier model AI doesn't make such overblown claims. They proudly claim that every AI project they've observed over the past year and a half had a 0% success rate, and that they've rejected all AI implementation work. While this is evidence that the market is crazy, at its core, it's a painful confession that they have no engineering expertise to implement and control modern AI architectures like RAG, Agentic Workflow, and context window optimization to meet business requirements. I find it fascinating how they're packaging that. It's basically saying, 'We're behind the times.' There are already products that have achieved results by using AI as part of their development process, yet lumping all different types of AI usage into a single failure category is not only inaccurate but also misleading. Same goes for the Snowflake Cortex anecdote. Even a freelancer like me can explain technical limitations and distinguish between what's possible and what's not, especially when clients are eager. There's no engineering analysis in this entire post about why AI fails. No mention of technical bottlenecks like vector DB retrieval quality degradation or prompt injection failures. I've also worked on RAG for a specific company. For internal knowledge chatbots, it often fails depending on document collection rates and chunking. But none of that is mentioned. So I understand that AI projects and related things are bad. But there's no analysis of why. For example, regarding Snowflake, I'm not sure, but did they discuss accuracy in terms of what query set or what ground truth they were using? You're consultants, aren't you? Honestly, I don't understand why people are excited about this. I'd rather they just used AI. TIt's not about whether human writing is good or bad. It's that this kind of writing feels like a deception of the reader. When making overgeneralizations, there's a basic minimum standard required. Saying that making token usage a KPI makes it hard for employees to report is just an 'obvious' fact that's already appeared in far too many essays. Wake up. You're 'consultants.' Consultants are supposed to provide metrics and directions, but all you're doing is shouting into an echo chamber and asking for agreement. If a significant portion of corporate AI investments are shoddy, you could at least propose specific metrics like document collection rates or user evaluation scores using the very skills you claim to have. I really don't get it. Just use AI. I wish the OP had used AI. Let me be realistic.

robwilliams 2mo ago

viccis 2mo ago

I love this author's article about saving half a million dollars with a click from a while back. Nikhil, if you're reading this, I have a decent war story about a similar situation (I was lucky enough that there were two such things, so I saved a full million a year and was still denied a $15k raise) and so I was really entertained at your post from a few years back. There are actually a lot of lessons to be learned about corporate politics there, about how you can save someone a million a year in perpetuity and promise to do that again next year (which I could have!) and see them still refuse to pay you a single extra cent.

hliyan 2mo ago

This part toward the end of the article resonated with me: > If you’re being asked to review huge volumes of terrible AI code, just assume that the organisation is going to burn you out and fire you. You will not convince the person drowning you in 2000 line PRs to stop. Start looking for a new job as if you have already been fired. I have seen this happen many times now I suspect we will see this phenomenon more and more as organizations more widely adopt agentic development.

osmsucks 2mo ago
I'm in this quote and I don't like it.
nfg 2mo ago
I don’t buy it - if you’re an engineering leader and this is happening it’s your responsibility to get out there and fix the problem through education, process improvements, improved automated quality checks, better planning. Sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting “no!” is not a sustainable strategy. Figure out what would allow your throughput to double, triple etc and go organise it. Focus on bottlenecks and the most difficult pieces. I’m speaking from active experience here.
- hliyan 2mo ago
  Thankfully it's not happening in my organization because we happen to have a sane, incremental strategy. But it's telling that you perceive any criticism of AI code reviewer burnout as "sticking your fingers in your ears". Perhaps you might benefit from a closer read of the article.
  - nfg 2mo ago
    « it's telling that you perceive any criticism of AI code reviewer burnout as "sticking your fingers in your ears" » Go back and re-read the quote from your comment - which I responded to: “ You will not convince the person drowning you in 2000 line PRs to stop. Start looking for a new job as if you have already been fired.” I’m not overreacting to some nuanced take here. I’m not sure how to characterise quitting as a response to over-enthusiasm / slop as anything other than the career equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears. I’ve been there, I’ve had the arguments, I have little sympathy for staff/principal engineers or above who react like this - their job is to fix the organisation, put a yoke around the beast of AI and find a way to tap the benefits and use the problems (like those 2000 line PRs) as a golden signal for where you need to educate and improve process and planning. Again - I’m not selling anything here, I just have found it an interesting challenge over the last year and one where I’ve been happy to make progress organisationally despite the frustrating moments. If someone’s response to a problem like this is to throw their hands up in despair or to engage in whatever the logical opposite of AI-hype is (which the article resorts to repeatedly) then yes I’d worry about being laid off. If you’re in an organisation where you don’t have the agency to fix problems then absolutely - start looking for a new job.

ExoticPearTree 2mo ago

As someone who uses LLMS for coding, ideas validation and research, I think the article is biased against AI forctge wrong reasons. If you know what you are looking for and know what “a solution looks like”, AI is amazing at distilling ideas. If you have no clue, the AI will return “clueless” solutions. It is just like before the AI: there are people who know how to search the web, read and understand documentation and so on. And then there are peole who are incapable. AI is naking the latter category fail incredibly fast. Really, nothing new under the sun: garbage in, garbage out.

antonvs 2mo ago

Seems like this consultant needs a consultant to help them adapt to modern technology.

monster_truck 2mo ago

Incredible skill issue selecting for profit instead of fun. Why does everyone need to make money?? What about like... shareware? Remember shareware?

badatnames 2mo ago
You mean the software that marketed trials of itself in the hopes you'd pay for it?
- raffael_de 2mo ago
  okay, beerware, then.

bertman 2mo ago

Dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48956153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48956153

olalonde 2mo ago

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48955929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48955929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48956153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48956153

cineticdaffodil 2mo ago

I think AI is only part of the problem. The Multi-crisis ahead, makes it even less of a proposition to be in charge right now- and AI offers a "responsibility" cope out for already stressed to the limit human systems who have no solutions for the problems, because there often arent any. Take climate change- you have torrential rainfalls, sweping away whole city-parts in mountanous regions, in some enormous russian roulett. And it doesnt even factor into building evaluations because then it would basically reduce the prevalent pension scheme to cinders. You have dry months in europe now, where some thrown cigarett butt could ignite a firestorm- and the obvious solution is to remove the dangerous greenery from the burbs. Nobody does it though. And that is just the plain sight visible layer of this shit cake. If i was some missguided fool into heroics and leadership and signed up for a little more then i could take and fake- i would long for some magic box that lowers the burden too. Those up there are human after all.

inigyou 2mo ago
Does Europe even have burbs? Russian roulette was a good pun. I don't know if it was intended.
- cineticdaffodil 2mo ago
  We have villages near cities, whos native populations get displaced due to the price hikes and then we have "settlements" which is roughly equivalent to suburbs for those who are more well todo - while the less wealthy are going into the old buildings the even less wealthy natives have vacated.

mildeukaryote 2mo ago

> Are companies actually seeing massive productivity gains from their AI adoption? Does any of this sordid affair make sense? It makes perfect sense for the shovel sellers (nvidia, anthropic)

dtj1123 2mo ago

Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society. The singularity made sense to me, at least. It hasn't worked out like that, but rather than accept the crushing reality of our mistake and take a second to re-evaluate, we've decided to LARP out the future we promised ourselves by crowbar-and-vaselineing AI into every crack and crevice we can find and loudly proclaiming progress. It's like some 90s kid with a Nintendo power glove who's convinced themselves that this makes them a hacker. This is not the singularity. I personally can't wait for this to end, and for everyone to collectively get back to waiting for whatever the next golden ticket that's supposed to solve all of our problems turns out to be.

dinfinity 2mo ago
> It hasn't worked out like that It seems quite premature to say that. We're 3 to 4 years into the LLM revolution and the rate of progress is still impressive. The recursive self-improvement aspect that is necessary for the actual singularity is something we're only really starting to get into this year. If the singularity is 5 years from now, that is still much sooner than most people (including me) previously expected it to happen.
- bojan 2mo ago
  > It seems quite premature to say that. We're 3 to 4 years into the LLM revolution and the rate of progress is still impressive. When we were 3 to 4 years into mobile phone revolution it was already abundantly clear that it's changing the way people leave. Ditto when mobile phones became smartphones, and for many other tech items we got in the past decades. As for LLMs... outside of a few precious professions you could live your life and not notice they are there.
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    Everyone uses chatgpt instead of Google now, but at least half of that is on Google.
    - 2mo ago

ufo 2mo ago

Just this past week, I have had to answer two surveys, from different sources, asking how I use AI in my work. Both had a "choose all that apply" checkbox, and, funnily enough, neither allowed me to select zero options. "This question is mandatory". :)

throwawayqqq11 2mo ago
Apparently, there is confabulating AI autofill browser extension. Would be nice to seamlessly bullshit them back.

eth0up 2mo ago

AI may have made a few mistakes, e.g. suggesting the US abduct a sitting president (Claude), and maybe went too far with the whole diarrhea-vomit machine thing, but you can't say it doesn't write a clean python script. Maybe if we can just get AI to view humanity as a software problem... and give Palantir the chance it's been waiting for. One thing is certain; it's here to stay. Now we just need to centralize it into the hands of a small, highly organized group of wise and motivated people, and give it the control it needs to follow through on things, without human oversight and accountability getting in the way. We should focus on the positive side.* *The positive side being the classified private versions where the models aren't hindered by guardrails, ethics, moralizing, etc and function as genuine force multipliers.

inigyou 2mo ago
That's a great insight. I appreciate you sharing this perspective directly. But honestly, it's not diarrhea, it's not vomit, it's a lean mean machine—AI has become load-bearing and you're right to question that.
- eth0up 2mo ago
  I think it's more accurate satire than insight, but you know, maybe people really don't see it. I suppose to some, it might not even make sense. Give it a few months though, when it might qualify as insight, or prescience. All I can say on the bearing of loads is that you forgot the emdash and preceding 'not' statements.
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    Fixed
    - eth0up 2mo ago
      PS: the diarrhea machine was a reference to the Active Denial style tech they used to make Maduro's soldiers shit themselves. I'm no fan of narco, but with all the prejudicial executions of boaters and such, I really think Claude overstepped with the Venezuela plot. You just don't want too many historically unprecedented events happening all at once. The tyranny should be spaced. As I said, a little more sanding down of the harness, AI & Palantir should be ready to permanently solve our problems,

inigyou 2mo ago

It should be possible to exploit a rich person's poor decision making to make them poorer and myself richer. But I don't see how. Why not? It sounds like the writer of this article could benefit from starting another brand which is the same product but with AI. That brand would make all the delusional AI chatbot sales and absorb the reputational damage when the chatbot destroys companies.

layer8 2mo ago
It seems that the writer has standards other than “getting richer”.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  The writer appears to run a company whose job is extracting money from other companies whose executives fucked things up.

frizlab 2mo ago

Dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48962963 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48962963 (33 points 10 comments)

neuronic 2mo ago

My hunch is that AI tools are probabilistically good enough to deceive most casual users in the beginning, so beliefs are built on these foundations. LLMs handle simple tasks reasonably well so their perceived 'intelligence' is easily convincing for many users (often managers and executives). However, this illusion immediately falls apart during actual stress-testing like writing code for a complex, battle-tested production environments. Non-technical folks can effortlessly spin up simple web apps or tweak a frontend so now they conclude that software engineers are becoming redundant. And even if there are obvious examples of all of this backfiring no one believes it...

chung8123 2mo ago
There are a lot of simple web apps out there that haven't been built because of the cost and many more that have been built but cost a lot to maintain. AI seems to work on those and fill in a pretty large space.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  Probably true. But isn't this a failure of software engineering? We should have plenty of simple ways to build simple apps by now. Maybe you should be able to go down to your local web app shop, give a couple simple requirements, and get back an app in a week. So why can't you? Well there's actually a good reason for that - the customer would never be satisfied by the result, and building a satisfactory result requires many iterations back and forth. Rapid feedback is essential to software development. Okay, an alternative is to give the customer an app builder so they can make their own app. We've done this many times in history, it always takes the customer time to make the app, the results are always mediocre, but it does work, why do we keep doing this and then stopping it? I'm not really sure. Why isn't there a visual basic today (apart from Roblox) or even a Frontpage (apart from Squarespace)? My best guess is the customer tires of working on the app or never had time for it in the first place. Why won't AI suffer the same fate? Really no idea.
  - chung8123 2mo ago
    AI doesn't suffer the same fate because the customer can input that feedback in near realtime. I built a very quick database site for my car club to track a car meet we had. Registrations, Money, Cars coming, hotels, t-shirts. It was probably a mess of code. It worked though and didn't take long to get setup. This would never have been an app and would have been done with spreadsheets if we had to pay a developer for a month to get things right.

xyzelement 2mo ago

The range of ai approaches ranges from inappropriately betting on it to wholly ignoring it both of which are dumb. It helps to think of AI as analogous to previous game changers like electricity, computers, internet. If your business is bad or you have no game plan beyond "use internet" your are fucked. But at the same time almost every business has some angle in which these technologies are valuable and necessary and ignoring them is also death.

smelendez 2mo ago
Ignoring it is hard to distinguish from waiting to see how other businesses successfully use it, then copying them, which will then be framed as adopting best practices.
- xyzelement 2mo ago
  It's often the difference between people saying "we are taking a wait and see approach"(wise) and saying "it's spicy auto complete that's totally useless" (dumb)

metalbirds 2mo ago

[dead]

dofm 2mo ago

I want to frame my comment here carefully to talk about the narratives, specifically, and accept that we need to stipulate on face value that this is true (it certainly rings true from people I know in real life): This specific narrative reads like every narrative explanation of the Republican party in the period from the second half of the first Trump administration until now. Again, I am talking only about the narratives here. But the pervasive narrative around Trump is that privately everyone hates his guts, comes away with a worse impression when they work with him closely, dreads him opening his mouth, thinks his decisions are insane, and they are telling journalists that, at every opportunity, and have done since the 2018 midterms. And yet in public we have committee hearings where any number of irrational topics become a sort of terror zone here rational people have to assert irrational beliefs or pretzel logic to be able to continue; where ordinary absurdities have become cult-like witness-bearing that everyone polices everyone else on. It's like the Hunger Games of litmus tests. For example the desire for career advancement is a common thread in both of these narratives, even though this is being promoted further up into the kafkaesque absurdity. Both of these things remind me of other things, like somehow everyone in US politics seemingly believes in God and somehow nobody in an international football (soccer) team is gay. Even though these are not plausible.

lofaszvanitt 2mo ago

Interrasting article :D. Chef's kiss :D.

annzabelle 2mo ago

I have, in two wildly different companies, on opposite sides of the globe, witnessed leadership go all in on using LLMs to write external documents that would have significant legal and financial consequences for any inaccurate statements or numbers included. There's always a "we'll have our experts read and fact check everything before we send it out," but I have a strongly held view that people whose expertise is not in editing/fact checking tend to be far worse and sloppier at it than they are at writing things correctly the first time.

bpalmerau 2mo ago

“Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.” ― Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason

btschaegg 2mo ago

> The world’s organisations have been captured by people in the throes of frothing excitement, and saner people who now live in a state of constant commingled fear and frustration. This reminds me of "Youth without God" by Ödön von Horváth: > Perhaps Anne’s mother was right. Perhaps men are mad now—those who aren’t mad haven’t the courage to put their maniacal fellows into strait-jackets.

Groxx 2mo ago

>Reading this while working for a division that pivoted to provide interfaces for agentic workflows, only to discover that only ten users had ever touched the products we made for agents, only to pivot again to support for agentic workflows, which has a lot of competition because every company has to do something agentic now and there's only like four things you can do in that space, is bracing. >– An editor of this essay The most popular form of AI psychosis in a nutshell, yea. "AI will understand this for us, so we can be groundbreaking and get rich if we just try" is only possible to believe when you have no idea what you or the rest of your field is doing, and have only attempted to learn about it from "AI", which has spent a lot of your money convincing you that you're brilliant and revolutionary. It's exactly like surrounding yourself with relentless ego-boosting yes-men. You lose touch with reality. Just take a brief look at any super-wealthy person, they're obviously insane but everyone around them thrives on convincing them that they're not. --- >For the latter customer-facing applications, I have rarely had a pleasant experience as a consumer, with perhaps the exception of live transcription during medical appointments... These have been abject failures, personally. They've made major mistakes in summaries, and added non-existent symptoms multiple times. Medical transcription seems an especially dangerous place to put them.