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.

▲

SCdF 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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/

	▲	an hour ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

▲

dbbk 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

	▲	acdha 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	Sharlin 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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?

▲

csomar 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Just like crypto this will also pass.

▲

ksynwa 6 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	Sharlin 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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).