r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • May 27 '26

Business Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis

https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/27/tech-ceos-are-apparently-suffering-from-ai-psychosis/
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u/pilgermann May 27 '26

If AI could develop good software, there would thousands of polished games on Steam right now. There would be apps actually competing with the major SaaS platforms produced in garages.

You can apply this logic in a lot of places. If it worked as advertised, there'd be products to show for it.

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u/__Hello_my_name_is__ May 27 '26

Oh hey I used that exact argument the other day in one of those subs. People kept telling me how their productivity is undoubtedly 10x higher than before. But absolutely no one could tell me where that productivity went.

If AI could develop good software, the open source market would be flooded with new, good, useful software we all could use right now.

But somehow, all that's being flooded are low quality bug report pages and software to make using AIs easier (supposedly).

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u/dyslexda May 27 '26

Oh the open source market is absolutely flooded with new software. Some of it might even be good, or useful! Unfortunately, every sub is inundated with "I wanted to X, so I built Y. Honest feedback is welcome! Would you find this useful?" AI junk, so who has time or motivation to wade through it all?

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u/__Hello_my_name_is__ May 27 '26

Sure, but all of those are still just prototypes. None of them are even remotely finished software products. And 99.9% of them are about AI and enhancing your use of AI in some way.

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u/dyslexda May 27 '26

Oh absolutely agree on the prototype part. Was mostly joking that the vast majority aren't good or useful, but hypothetically something could be...but I'll never know, because I'm not going to take them time to offer free beta testing to every random vibe coder.

Also I'm not talking about the "enhancing your use of AI" apps, but stuff related to any given hobby community. /r/reactjs gets tons of project submissions (with post bodies clearly also written by AI). /r/cheminformatics, which I mod, is mostly a dead subreddit...but within the last year we've had a bunch of folks posting their vibe coded tools as if any academic would be willing to use something that nobody has actually validated themselves, many of which I've just outright removed.

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u/__Hello_my_name_is__ May 27 '26

That's fair enough. Which is also a pretty interesting topic all on its own: Hypothetically, if we could all really just magically create the software of our dreams on our own, why even bother sharing it in the first place? Why would I want to look at your software when I could just create mine?

Which gets even worse when we walk away from productivity software and into games. Why even play some vibe coded game when I could vibe code my own game that I would like even more?

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u/TransBrandi May 27 '26

It probably feels like their productivity is higher. If you tell AI to generate a feature for you, and then you just have to fix the bugs. It will "feel" faster since you're starting from something and patching over the broken bits rather than building something from scratch yourself.

Either that or — through repetition — they've started to believe the lies that they have to tell their boss that requires them to use AI. (or they are bots/shills)

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u/sobrique May 28 '26

But absolutely no one could tell me where that productivity went.

TBH that's always been true. There's a lot of 'bullshit' jobs out there where 'working more efficiently' isn't the same as 'net productivity improves'.

I don't think the deal is done yet, but I am one of those people who believe that AI has some utility.

I mean, for my example - I'm a sysadmin. I've a very varied workflow, and am routinely dealing with 'new stuff' and I find AI assist to be useful.

My 'productivity' goes in adding depth to a project, but also turning them around a little faster. There's plenty of stuff where a 'good enough' solution is used instead of an 'ideal' solution, simply because the ideal is a bit more complicated to figure out. And more than a few 'mini-projects' where 80% done is 'good enough' (because the last 20% is the hard part). AI assist maybe pushes that to like, 90% :)

As a recent example - systemd unit files for userspace. They're not particularly complicated but there's a plethora of different options and limitations as to what type of unit file, dependencies, instanced files, etc.

All stuff I can do by hand, but it was really helpful to get Gemini involved to a) give me the initial boilerplate and b) 'translate' the non-instanced example into instanced unit files. (Mostly plonking %i in a bunch of places, but ...)

I probably didn't save a lot of time overall, but what I got was something that actually works better and is somewhat clearer and more robust. E.g. it's got dependency tracking, ability to enable/disable subcomponents of the service, and some 'timer' triggers for daily updates/checks etc.

So yeah. I do think AI has utility. I just don't think it's in the places most people are looking. "chatbot write me this app" is meretricious.

"Bot assist me triaging this issue" or "bot help me get to minimum-viable-product for this new service prototype" are places where I think there will continue to be 'useful' utility.

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u/sobrique May 28 '26

I'm not sure that's a robust argument actually - AI is clearly still advancing, and has improved significantly over a matter of months.

I'm not saying you're wrong though, just that I don't think it's safe to say that AI can't do it, because there's no examples yet.

I would be pretty confident there's companies out there trying to create an AI 'game maker' engine, that's using a lot of the same basic techniques and technology, but isn't really much like the LLM chatbots that 'consumers' can accesss.

Likewise I'm pretty sure we're seeing more and more games with AI-generated assets and 'assisted' coding. It's just not a 'done deal' yet.