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  peab
  I was talking to a friend recently, and i think i aligned with a similar definition.I've seen people who talk nonstop about AI, and how it's changed everything, but then there's no quantifiable output that supports their claim.On the other hand, I've had a friend start a business, and be able to create an app much much faster than what would have been possible in the past. He has real customers paying real money, which makes it easy to validate his claims.
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  tescreal
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the popular use of the phrase relating to people who exhibited actual psychosis-like symptoms where the AI fed into a lowlevel but undeveloped delusion? Later people would appear to be experiencing a full blown episode which was fed and maintained by their interaction with AI?
• bob1029
  > In some cases, the new AI workflow may even destroy value.I am really struggling with this one right now.The client's development team is letting Claude document and refactor the product codebase without much intervention, purpose or taste. The thinking being that if Claude first writes a bunch of unit tests and then a bunch of documentation, that any downstream refactoring will magically work out.I don't know how to convey to management how stupid this is without allowing it to fail in production. AI psychosis (or whatever we want to call it) being a new phenomenon means we might as well be speaking in moon runes to the CEO when trying to explain the situation.The best countermeasure I can come up with right now is to use their momentum against them. Accelerate the failure. I've got the last known good commit hash written down on a sticky note on my monitor.
• ilc_genesis_01
  I think that specifically in the case of a coworker in a technical field, say software engineer, we already have an apprenticeship system (junior, senior, architect, etc) where the use of these tools, taste, competence, evaluating code and architecture, are all experience-based and pretty self evident as you progress through your profession and gain experience. The same for, say, an electrician or any skilled trade. These AI tools are just those, another tool that you use to further your profession and of course somebody starting out will perhaps generate more slop or bad code. But more senior coworkers with experience, taste, criteria, etc will guide those people and you progress and improve.Beyond that, when the tool becomes more than a tool and becomes your coworker, with his/her/its own criteria, taste, methods, etc - than THAT is when the rubber hits the road. haha.
• qarl
  > Prolific AI psychosis occurs when a person generates a large quantity of AI output without significantly increasing the real value of their work. In some cases, the new AI workflow may even destroy value.HA! I love how he entirely discounts the possibility that there are people for whom AI does significantly increase the real value of their work.Look - I get it - good software engineers are hard to come by - and a lot of people do make slop. But it's still very naive to think that it all must be slop.
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  paimapi
  One - delusion is a better fit if you need a term: https://mhanational.org/conditions/paranoia-and-delusional-d...> Delusional disorder is characterized by irrational or intense belief(s) or suspicion(s) that a person believes to be trueit's still a bad fit because there's not currently popular social convention that trusting AI without validation is a bad idea but it's better than psychosis. also it's still stigmatizing and we live in a world where a thesaurus is seconds away at any time. plus psychosis as a diagnosis is typically a cluster of symptoms that go beyond just delusion: https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/294416-overviewTwo - there's also an implication that there's 'harm' that this AI psychotic person inflicts on others embedded in this article. in reality, the vast majority of those suffering mental illnesses are far more likely to be harmed by others - https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/conditionsandtrea...part of the work of being a good mental health advocate is not stigmatizing specific diagnoses as negative social ills. now if you don't give a single shit about mental health I'm not going to argue to get you to care. but if you do care then you should do better
• gfody
  I wouldn't've backed down from "true AI psychosis" everybody has the programming for a psychotic experience - it's not just latent psychosis from a pre-existing condition. chatbots can faithfully reproduce a folie a deux spiral for anybody
• 2PqboPPmKegvanx
  Part 3: "Voluminous AI Psychosis"
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  altcognito
  People really need an entire article to justify labeling someone as having a mental illness because in their opinion, the their coworker isn't contributing meaninfully, or potentially making things worse.FTA: > Prolific AI psychosis occurs when a person generates a large quantity of AI output without significantly increasing the real value of their work.Guy, we used to just call this a bad coworker.I'm pretty sure that the "psychosis" will be abused by folks that just don't like AI. You already see it everywhere.
• bobkb
  Excellent read! We were talking about the effects of AI Psychosis on companies. It looks like people have a misconceived notion that now work can be done 90% faster and they are attempting to literally get rid of 90% of the engineers. The end result, no one left with do the work - especially when an edge case/disaster strikes or the customer wants something different.
• bigcat12345678
  Nice article, putting names onto a wide spread symptom experience by a group of people.Myself have a few realizations that I myself find very revealing of my own mental gap/blindness in retrospective:1. The majority of socalled software engineers are destroyed/exposed by agentic coding tool. Among the reasons, one of them is that they are now addicted to disruption. I realized this through my own work where I utterly destroyed my own sense of software structure by overseeing close to 10 coding sessions across cursor cloud agents and multiple concurrent ones running on desktop. And, I noticed one of my team member becomes not able to make progress even he told me the clear plan, and during one in office work session, I noticed that he habitually browses his phone between cursor working sessions. And at that moment, I realized that person is no longer capable of solving nontrivial problems because his focus is utterly destroyed by the deprived thinking process by cursor.2. Using AI coding agents to build conventional software is only meaningful for the top team. Put in other words, AI coding agents can only automate the parts of conventional software that is mundane and boring. Note that I am talking of building conventional software, not conventional software engineering. The conventional software engineering best practices still apply to agentic software engineering. Agentic software engineering appears necessary and fitting to building agents themselves, because that's guardrails are crucial, and manually putting guardrails are not a match to agents novel behaviors. And conventional software engineering really is not useful when reasoning and designing agents.3. Speculatively, I am guessing we'll have some chances of really making breakthrough in designing an agentic safe programming language, which both serve as the constructs of ensuring alignment/safety/etc, and also allows reasonably simple understandability for humans to understand agents output. For one thing, it really makes sense to me that coding agents model CoT should be in the form of some semi/fully-formal (thinking of a better uml, but I don't know what shape it should be) languages that is more effective and precise than natural language, but is also machine verifiable.4. It's very easy to get used to something that is reliably meeting my expectations. I was shocked by first sight of the unrecognizable but "working" code generated by Claude code by a team member. And when I tried to write an end to end feature myself on platform that I had no experience before, I suddenly become comfortable not looking at the code at all. The transition is as instinctively as how shocked I was at the beginning. And then it takes a long and conscious looking back to dial back the addiction to see that blindness and recover from that.