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.
I have literal quantifiable output that supports the claim when I make it. I've literally been building tools for a customer of mine since January, and while it started out kind of slow, it's now paying my bills entirely every month. I am so busy baby sitting the robots and adding new projects on that I don't really have any time to find new customers right now? But I'm thinking I should have most of the stuff they're going to need done here by the end of the year, so next up, I have to find more people and maintain their tooling...
I don't want to get into the nitty gritty, but I'm kind of at the nexus of tech and aviation with my experience in life. The result has been that I can build tools that directly apply to my customers' requirements and I know wtf I'm doing in the industry. I think if I was "just a dev" or "just a former pilot" I'd be kind of screwed because I wouldn't know what I was doing? But, the reality is that because I know how to do both I'm able to make money. I don't have to look up "what an IAP is" means or "what is the 1-4-1 rule and 2-2-1/2 rule" means or "what is an OpSpec?" frantically when I am figuring out what they need. That's quite helpful.
If you know what the hell you're doing, this is a game changer. Like, "oh, I need a custom CRM spooled up that covers things that aren't in typical CRM software" - if you're a developer you probably don't know what people actually want; if you're just an industry expert you don't know wtf sql is. But if you're kind of blend of both you can add real value.
Generalist > specialist right now. I doubt that holds for much more than about a dozen months or so.
No, my friend, if you are deeper than "just a pilot" and also capable of defining and building software (even with claude) that works and works well as extensions to industry tools like CRM, then you are not a generalist, you are an intersectional specialist of the kind Scott Adams used to talk about as "skill stacks" here:
I agree that there are people who can see the potential of these tools, and are enthusiastic boosters, yet are still unable to realize the benefits for themselves for whatever reason. I feel like these people are somewhat rare, and labeling them has having a kind of psychosis strikes me as sneering elitism.
I don't think I elaborated on the type of person that I would consider having AI psychosis. It isn't just being enthusiastic. What I've seen (and it's not common, but I've seen it a few times), is this sort of arrogance around using AI, this "better than thou" attitude, and lack of consideration for things outside of AI, in their real life.
Back in the 2010s, the best, most efficient software engineers were characterized by 3 things
* end to end rough map of the entire space of compute in their head
* ability to search the internet for the right things
* ability to quickly experiment and try things to figure out how to do things
AI hasn't change that, it just made 2 and 3 into a very efficient thing.
The characterization of psychosis is best described by believing AI can do the first thing. No modern LLM can "reason" - otherwise you could give it a task like "make me money", it would ask you all the questions it needs about information that it doesn't know about and needs to know to make you money, then it would set whatever it needs to set up to make you money.
As such, you still need to know the domain entirely to be effective. When you do that, AI is fantastic at getting you to the right solution. Furthermore, its still in large part actually cheaper to higher a developer who then can use AI to build you the product that you need long term.
> No modern LLM can "reason" - otherwise you could give it a task like "make me money", it would ask you all the questions it needs about information that it doesn't know about and needs to know to make you money, then it would set whatever it needs to set up to make you money.
If that's your bar for reasoning, then most people can't reason either.
> I've seen people who talk nonstop about ________, and how it's changed everything, but then there's no quantifiable output that supports their claim.
How would you feel about applying the same rule to artists?
I've seen people who work on art nonstop and think their art is really meaningful, get really into it, but there's little output that anyone cares about or that changes the world or that anyone would pay for.
On the other hand I've had friends who created some art, and have real customers paying real money, ....so it's easy to tell their art project is meaningful. (is that the conclusion?)
Maybe something (AI, code, an AI-coded project) doesn't need to have value to others or be worth money for it to be meaningful to the person who created it.
I think a lot of artists want to have psychosis because it would improve their art ahaha.
On a more serious note - real art is not validated by making money. If you want to be a full time artist, then you also have to run a business. But if all you care about is the art, then money has no relevance.
Business on the other hand, is all about making money.
> 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.
> 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.
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?
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
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.
> Delusional disorder is characterized by irrational or intense belief(s) or suspicion(s) that a person believes to be true
it'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-overview
Two - 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
> Psychosis as a diagnosis is a serious condition. there's an implication that there's 'harm'
I just watched a company fire an entire department of people under the sincere belief a chatbot run by a middle manager could save them 10 million a year. This failed miserably and they now need to hire or re-hire people.
There is a tremendous amount of harm happening. Psychosis is a perfect term for what is happening.
it absolutely is not. when we think of harm in a diagnosis of psychotic disorders, we're talking about things like getting shot to death by the police, running out onto the highway, etc. it is not callously making a lot of people have to jobhunt
which isn't to say that layoffs don't suck (I was impacted by one very recently) but it's not psychosis that causes that to happen, it's greed and short-term shareholder-fixated thinking. that should be named instead of a mental illness that people suffer from
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.
its the same individuals in my experience. i don't see people who used to be good employees suddenly sending a 3000 word email, but i sure do see that out of the people who were bad coworkers 12 months ago and still are today.
low effort work though, that's nothing new... accelerating that low effort: that is new... but the low effort work hasn't been changed by ai: only illuminated more clearly.
Song as old as time - people were doing this well before AI, there's just yet another reason for these types of people to categorize workers and pretend that management can be perfect and easy and that the world isn't hard.
It's almost as if it's a little bit harder than people think to figure out how good people are at the jobs and who deserves promotions, etc, and that maybe they may not have the most perfect unbiased judgements.
I was bound to agree with you before I RTFA. The classification is useful for a psychiatrist, i.e. someone who wants to help the person.
"Bad coworker" can have many causes. In prolific AI psychosis, I think the assumption (differential diagnosis) is, they became a "bad coworker" due to use of AI, so they were a "good coworker" before.
You certainly seem to have your mind made up about this either way, but a humble fwiw nevertheless: the author is a psychiatrist, not some bitter dev/hypothetical coworker like you seem to be suggesting.
Sorry but the pro-AI/AI boosters do the exact same thing when they say that people who don't use AI are "Luddites" and the like. And I'm pretty sure the Luddite thing has been going on for far longer than the AI psychosis labeling.
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.
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.
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.
I have literal quantifiable output that supports the claim when I make it. I've literally been building tools for a customer of mine since January, and while it started out kind of slow, it's now paying my bills entirely every month. I am so busy baby sitting the robots and adding new projects on that I don't really have any time to find new customers right now? But I'm thinking I should have most of the stuff they're going to need done here by the end of the year, so next up, I have to find more people and maintain their tooling...
I don't want to get into the nitty gritty, but I'm kind of at the nexus of tech and aviation with my experience in life. The result has been that I can build tools that directly apply to my customers' requirements and I know wtf I'm doing in the industry. I think if I was "just a dev" or "just a former pilot" I'd be kind of screwed because I wouldn't know what I was doing? But, the reality is that because I know how to do both I'm able to make money. I don't have to look up "what an IAP is" means or "what is the 1-4-1 rule and 2-2-1/2 rule" means or "what is an OpSpec?" frantically when I am figuring out what they need. That's quite helpful.
If you know what the hell you're doing, this is a game changer. Like, "oh, I need a custom CRM spooled up that covers things that aren't in typical CRM software" - if you're a developer you probably don't know what people actually want; if you're just an industry expert you don't know wtf sql is. But if you're kind of blend of both you can add real value.
Generalist > specialist right now. I doubt that holds for much more than about a dozen months or so.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rG3PcdTyZ6w
You have two good skills, median-level among those specializations probably, and combine them into a top-tier niche ability.
Also, did you voluntarily disclose that you thought that comment was about you? It feels like you are the friend they were talking about, lol
I agree that there are people who can see the potential of these tools, and are enthusiastic boosters, yet are still unable to realize the benefits for themselves for whatever reason. I feel like these people are somewhat rare, and labeling them has having a kind of psychosis strikes me as sneering elitism.
I don't think I elaborated on the type of person that I would consider having AI psychosis. It isn't just being enthusiastic. What I've seen (and it's not common, but I've seen it a few times), is this sort of arrogance around using AI, this "better than thou" attitude, and lack of consideration for things outside of AI, in their real life.
Back in the 2010s, the best, most efficient software engineers were characterized by 3 things
* end to end rough map of the entire space of compute in their head
* ability to search the internet for the right things
* ability to quickly experiment and try things to figure out how to do things
AI hasn't change that, it just made 2 and 3 into a very efficient thing.
The characterization of psychosis is best described by believing AI can do the first thing. No modern LLM can "reason" - otherwise you could give it a task like "make me money", it would ask you all the questions it needs about information that it doesn't know about and needs to know to make you money, then it would set whatever it needs to set up to make you money.
As such, you still need to know the domain entirely to be effective. When you do that, AI is fantastic at getting you to the right solution. Furthermore, its still in large part actually cheaper to higher a developer who then can use AI to build you the product that you need long term.
> No modern LLM can "reason" - otherwise you could give it a task like "make me money", it would ask you all the questions it needs about information that it doesn't know about and needs to know to make you money, then it would set whatever it needs to set up to make you money.
If that's your bar for reasoning, then most people can't reason either.
> I've seen people who talk nonstop about ________, and how it's changed everything, but then there's no quantifiable output that supports their claim.
These people have existed forever
How would you feel about applying the same rule to artists?
I've seen people who work on art nonstop and think their art is really meaningful, get really into it, but there's little output that anyone cares about or that changes the world or that anyone would pay for.
On the other hand I've had friends who created some art, and have real customers paying real money, ....so it's easy to tell their art project is meaningful. (is that the conclusion?)
Maybe something (AI, code, an AI-coded project) doesn't need to have value to others or be worth money for it to be meaningful to the person who created it.
I think a lot of artists want to have psychosis because it would improve their art ahaha.
On a more serious note - real art is not validated by making money. If you want to be a full time artist, then you also have to run a business. But if all you care about is the art, then money has no relevance.
Business on the other hand, is all about making money.
> 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.
> 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.
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?
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
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.
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 true
it'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-overview
Two - 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
> Psychosis as a diagnosis is a serious condition. there's an implication that there's 'harm'
I just watched a company fire an entire department of people under the sincere belief a chatbot run by a middle manager could save them 10 million a year. This failed miserably and they now need to hire or re-hire people.
There is a tremendous amount of harm happening. Psychosis is a perfect term for what is happening.
it absolutely is not. when we think of harm in a diagnosis of psychotic disorders, we're talking about things like getting shot to death by the police, running out onto the highway, etc. it is not callously making a lot of people have to jobhunt
which isn't to say that layoffs don't suck (I was impacted by one very recently) but it's not psychosis that causes that to happen, it's greed and short-term shareholder-fixated thinking. that should be named instead of a mental illness that people suffer from
A bad business decision is not psychosis. Misjudging the value provided by a product is not psychosis.
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.
> Guy, we used to just call this a bad coworker.
Not that long ago. People generating large quantities of AI output is a relatively recent phenomenon. At least when compared to labels like this.
its the same individuals in my experience. i don't see people who used to be good employees suddenly sending a 3000 word email, but i sure do see that out of the people who were bad coworkers 12 months ago and still are today.
low effort work though, that's nothing new... accelerating that low effort: that is new... but the low effort work hasn't been changed by ai: only illuminated more clearly.
Song as old as time - people were doing this well before AI, there's just yet another reason for these types of people to categorize workers and pretend that management can be perfect and easy and that the world isn't hard.
It's almost as if it's a little bit harder than people think to figure out how good people are at the jobs and who deserves promotions, etc, and that maybe they may not have the most perfect unbiased judgements.
I was bound to agree with you before I RTFA. The classification is useful for a psychiatrist, i.e. someone who wants to help the person.
"Bad coworker" can have many causes. In prolific AI psychosis, I think the assumption (differential diagnosis) is, they became a "bad coworker" due to use of AI, so they were a "good coworker" before.
As someone else point out, the term is stigmatizing, psychosis is a very strong term, and as I very much noted, already being misused and abused.
You certainly seem to have your mind made up about this either way, but a humble fwiw nevertheless: the author is a psychiatrist, not some bitter dev/hypothetical coworker like you seem to be suggesting.
I did dig into that after I read it. Even more depressing honestly. He should know better than to throw around labels.
Sorry but the pro-AI/AI boosters do the exact same thing when they say that people who don't use AI are "Luddites" and the like. And I'm pretty sure the Luddite thing has been going on for far longer than the AI psychosis labeling.
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.
Part 3: "Voluminous AI Psychosis"
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.