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Comment by yoyohello13 | Hacker News Reader

I feel like I’m watching group psychosis where people are just following each other off a cliff. I think the promise of AI and the potential money involved override all self preservation instincts in some people.

It would be fine if I could just ignore it, but they are infecting the entire industry.

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You need to take every comment about AI and mentally put a little bracketed note beside each one noting technical competence.

AI is basically an software development eternal september: it is by definition allowing a bunch of people who are not competent enough to build software without AI to build it. This is, in many ways, a good thing!

The bad thing is that there are a lot of comments and hype that superficially sound like they are coming from your experienced peers being turned to the light, but are actually from people who are not historically your peers, who are now coming into your spaces with enthusiasm for how they got here.

Like on the topic of this article[0], it would be deranged for Apple (or any company with a registered entity that could be sued) to ship an OpenClaw equivalent. It is, and forever will be[1] a massive footgun that you would not want to be legally responsible for people using safely. Apple especially: a company who proudly cares about your privacy and data safety? Anyone with the kind of technical knowledge you'd expect around HN would know that them moving first on this would be bonkers.

But here we are :-)

[0] OP's article is written by someone who wrote code for a few years nearly 20 years ago.

[1] while LLMs are the underlying technology https://simonwillison.net/tags/lethal-trifecta/

I don’t think it’s a group psychosis. I think it’s just the natural evolution of junior engineers. They’ve always lacked critical thinking and just jumped on whatever’s hyped on Twitter.

I’d really love to see some data on the age and/or experience distribution of these breathless "AI everywhere" folks. Are they mostly just young and easily influenced? Not analytic enough? Not critical-thinking enough? Not cynical enough?

It’s a group psychosis fueled by enormous financial pressure: every big tech company has been telling people that they’re getting fired as soon as possible unless they’re one of the few people who can operate these tools. Of course that’s going to have a bunch of people saying “Pick me! Pick me!” — especially since SV has become increasingly untethered from questions like whether something is profitably benefiting customers. With the focus on juicing share prices before moving to the distilled fiat pricing of cryptocurrency, we have at least two generations of tech workers being told that the path to phenomenal wealth comes from talking up your project until you find a rich buyer.

It is possible that AI is both over-hyped and is (or is becoming) a useful tool. The two can co-exist. Based on my own experience it is useful and it is a huge time saver, especially for experienced engineers who can figure out when to use it and when to avoid it. Trying to ignore AI is as unwise as ignoring any other new tool. I imagine lots of people thought static analysis tools were never going to live up to the hype and didn't need be part of a standard build/debug flow.

Just like crypto this will also pass.

Crypto hasn't really passed. It's just not talked about on HN anymore. It is still a massive industry but they have dropped the rhetoric of democratising banking and instead let you use cryptocurrency to do things like betting on US invading Venezuela and so on.

By "passing" the GP presumably meant that the fad phase has passed. The hype cycle has reached the natural plateau of "I guess this has some use cases" (though in this case mostly less-than-scrupulous ones).

Blockchain as a vehicle for immutable data has passed. Crypto has given up pretending it's anything other than a financial vehicle for gambling.

Also, the recruitment attempts I've gotten from crypto have completely disappeared compared to the peak (it's all AI startups now).

Maybe now "crypto" can go back to meaning cryptography.

No one can really figure out what legitimate uses crypto has that can't be covered by normal payment systems.

Everyone can immediately see how useful AI is, and tons of people are using it. Pretending it will pass would be like saying the Internet was a fad in 1997.

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