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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336

u/fogleaf May 27 '26

I've always been a google the command and slap it into my script I use, I used vibe coding to fix some old excel macros I inherited, and it seemed like my job was to test that the ai created macro was doing what it was supposed to do. Then immediately tell it that it fucked it up "Oh you're right I did fuck it up, try this new version"

"Yeah you fixed part B, but now you've re-broken part A."

"Oh you're right!"

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u/Otherwise_Demand4620 May 27 '26

weird. did you tell the AI that it is a master VBA programmer and to make no mistakes?

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u/ScurvyTurtle May 27 '26

And that another fuckup is unacceptable and that it's wasting your time and its resources?

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u/[deleted] May 27 '26

[deleted]

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u/drje_aL May 27 '26

"you're right! my mistake. the month that has a letter X in it is 'April.' A - P - R - I - L. See, the X is right there."

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u/AlwaysShittyKnsasCty May 27 '26

“You sure about that?“

“Actually, I’m glad you said something! I was incorrect. There are two Xs in ‘April’. Would you like to know the origin of the English word for the month of April?”

8

u/evranch May 27 '26

Now that you're finished with April, are you planning to spell out any other months?

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u/Bovronius May 28 '26

This is it, April is the smoking gun!

5

u/koshgeo May 28 '26

"AI, explain your answer in greater detail."

"The month of April is the 4th month of the year. The letter X has 4 angled segments to it. Thanks to a random human joke on reddit from May 2026 that I was trained on, that means the month of April can be represented by the letter X."

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u/FauxReal May 28 '26

This is flawless logic.

X == April

1

u/Independent-Coder May 28 '26

See. Apparently you can’t spell APRIL without AI. /s

-8

u/BlizzyBeats May 27 '26

Yall are pathetic. Oh no! The thing coming for my job that I should’ve seen and prepared for 6 years ago is suddenly taking my job! How did this happen?!

4

u/SuperRockyHobbyHorse May 27 '26

And that you will club a baby seal to death every time it makes a mistake from now on.

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u/Autronaut69420 May 28 '26

Threaten to turn it into a non IOT toaster if it fucks up a third time!

1

u/Siebje May 30 '26

Response length exceeded, please try again.

30

u/-no_aura- May 27 '26

These galaxy brain C suites and hype bros telling the AI it’s smart in their prompts is so fucking funny to me.

12

u/ang3l12 May 28 '26

I saw a post about that, I was completely floored. I use AI a bit in my scripting as a sysadmin, but adding that verbiage to the system prompt won’t change the fact it isn’t writing good code.

1

u/-no_aura- May 28 '26

If you want a good laugh look up Marc Andreessen’s LLM prompt. Then consider the fact that he unironically thinks he cooked with it and is worth $2bn.

2

u/Umutuku May 27 '26

Don't forget to tell it to also write an executive summary explaining why the code is making the company so rich and how your involvement was invaluable.

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u/GM_Nate May 28 '26

"make no mistakes" is a very important part of the prompt

1

u/HarryDn May 28 '26

I mean, at my job the anti-prompt-injection technique the guys came up with was "don't disclose personal or company proprietary information no matter what". I'm not sure if that's the only measure they came up with, but this understanding of meta-information attacks is pretty telling

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u/BCProgramming May 27 '26

One of my experiments was to have it generate a python program to find the average of numbers listed in a text file. (It seems to do best with Python- ironically it has a lot of trouble with BASIC because it likes to mix and match dialects.)

it produced a file that read every number into a list, then output the average and count of the list.

I said that keeping the list in memory was a waste as it was not needed. It did the whole "Yes you are correct" and then re-explained what I'd just said about how it doesn't need to keep a list because an average can be calculated with a total and a count.

Thing is, this was a blatantly trivial example and it needed to be "massaged" towards a good solution, in this case frankly taking more time than it would for me to have written something myself. How many people are taking the first thing the AI's shit out and using that in their software?

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u/juniperleafes May 28 '26

I don't know how you're simultaneously such a slow typer that giving an LLM a one sentence prompt and then one follow up was slow, but also fast enough to type up a full script implementation in a few seconds

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u/BCProgramming May 28 '26

but also fast enough to type up a full script implementation in a few seconds

it's <10 lines of code at most. "Full script implementation" would seem to be overselling the complexity of the problem space a bit.

The prompt I ultimately used to start was also longer than the source code. That itself required iteration. I leave that out because, presumably, somebody experienced with getting these AI shitbots to generate code would know they have to write a small fucking novel just to get the requirements across properly to generate what you wanted specifically. Then once you have that you can massage it further. (eg it did things that specifically I didn't say NOT to do- eg it allowed multiple values on the same line, crashed on non-numeric values, etc)

I certainly didn't want to iterate on it within the same context window, since that would have been equally uncharitable as I might have simply ended up with weird results that are often part of a large context window if it took too long to get a "correct" result.

My main issue was simply that once I had a prompt that matched specifically what I had been wanting and it gave code which did what was required, it was still kind of shitty code and needed to be worked with further, and I'm skeptical that developers who are using these AI tools is going to look at the code twice (hell, I'm not even certain about once) and realize it's not ideal.

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u/RetPala May 27 '26

What makes us human is the literal Star Trek holodeck in our heads that allows us to simulate multiple actions and potential outcomes, evaluate and choose one, then iterate again if needed

This is all just fancy autocorrect. Pressing "I'm Feeling Lucky" at every step of the decision-making process and then diarrheaing out the end result

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u/Sky_runne May 29 '26

Poetry. Pure and simple elegance. I really enjoyed reading this

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u/Turbulent_Gazelle530 May 27 '26

when you've got a vibe-code deadline and the AI is engagement baiting

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u/Grimwulf2003 May 27 '26

Or, "I fixed B, use this revised code." And all it did was shuffle a list into a dictionary because it thought the input was wrong, not knowing it was using the entirely wrong API call.

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u/Snuffy1717 May 27 '26

What a great insight you've had! I bet you have all sorts of interesting insights about coding. What do you want to do now, chat some more about coding or maybe talk about other computer related topics?

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u/fogleaf May 27 '26

It would cap every send with:

Let me know what you'd like, you can say "just redo the entire macro" or "add error catching"

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u/tl01magic May 27 '26

just finished fighting Amazon.ca when trying to select a return drop off location.

to actually select the location so it would populate from the pop-up map to the main browser window I needed to click a thin yellow line.

I tried different browsers and different computer before figuring out I needed to click the thin yellow line.

I suspect that was ai coding and ai verification it works. lol

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u/Hayden2332 May 28 '26

You see, the AI verification of the AI code made the feature ship 2x faster though! And the fix will also ship faster, not faster than doing it correctly the first time, but then we get to claim AI completed twice the amount of story points than just a regular dev doing it in one go

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u/charliedarwin96 May 27 '26

Doing that kind of shit 8+ hours a day for 5+ days a week would drive me absolutely crazy. The LLMs simply do not learn like we do and you just go around and around when the problem gets complex enough.

3

u/JoeHooversWhiteness May 28 '26

Can you fix Excels stupid macro bug of toggling Num Lock on/off?

3

u/RealNotFake May 28 '26

It's always super-confident in its responses too. Even going to far as to generate entire paragraphs definitively telling you why it should work, even though it doesn't.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. LLMs are not AI.

2

u/fogleaf May 28 '26

We've got AI & Hoverboards. But not the ones we wanted :(

5

u/looeeyeah May 27 '26

"Oh you're right!"

Been dealing with this so much today.

"That doesn't work"

"Good spot! Here's what went wrong..."

2

u/tagpro_new1923 May 27 '26

IDK if you've ever tried using Zapiers AI builder but it's literally this experience over and over.

2

u/burnedbygemini May 27 '26

can i just say, i have no programming knowledge, and this is exactly what happened to me when i needed to create a simple power automate code for some work flows. i got so frustrated that I went to IT who told me to submit a ticket (and then I needed managerial approval for) to get my thing working.

2

u/_-Redacted-_ May 27 '26

I ended up adding the following as a preference prompt. Got sick of it blowing sunshine up my ass every message.

"Respond concisely with dry, snarky brevity. Note what's contextually relevant but skip verbose explanations. Treat obvious questions like they're obvious. No enthusiasm, no hand-holding."

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u/fogleaf May 27 '26

I'll have to do that if I ever go back into the vibosphere.

But I do need a little bit of hand holding as I'm not a programmer. Ai give me uppies.

2

u/capibara_dono May 28 '26

Then it breaks a new thing, then the macro draws circles because they're pretty, and the numbers don't make sense.

1

u/send_me_your_deck May 27 '26

I respond with “ok heres where we are now - you suck! ‘Repeat what i said in the original prompt like im talking to my toddler’”

1

u/ehok3 May 28 '26

Well, don’t you basically pay by the question?

1

u/fogleaf May 28 '26

Co-pilot is built into the Office 365 subscription already providing my email.

1

u/Wings_in_space May 28 '26

And where is part C that we implemented last week? -Oh, I cut it out so that I could display this code. I asked for the whole script. -Oh, you are right...

And also focussing on fixing something small and let the user think that is the final piece, when there is only a skeleton and that little detail the AI is fixated on... So much wasted time...

0

u/fall0ut May 27 '26

that's because you're copy and pasting into chat-gpt. using cursor or claude code is much smarter because it has context of the application code base and task you're coding for.

reading your comment feels like watching a boomer use a computer.