I 100% can see this being the case not only with Zuck, but with many other companies. I am flabbergasted that I am a lowly peon in the machine, and yet unless I'm missing something, I seem to be a lot smarter than most of the people I see running these companies. I honestly feel like someone in the future is going to write a Greek tragedy about this time, because it's going to get real bad very soon
I know that lines of codes and PRs go up, but how much of that actually moves the needle forward?
Even then, outcomes at companies require external factors, like markets and competitors, and often don’t majorly depend on the company’s efforts.
I might not know him, but I don't think he changed. I think the circumstances changed and they happened to lead to another expression of who he is.
IMO the "AI psicosis" is just the latest expression of the hyper-capitalist ideology that has taken over Silicon Valley (and the USA).
Engineering at these companies was special, because there was good money to be made from software at practically nil materials and distribution costs. It was all labour; very specific labour. Instead of a million-dollar idea taking months and lots of $$$ to prototype, mass-produce, and distribute, the right people could type for a week, press a button, and reach millions of people pretty much instantly.
Of course capitalism is going to be kind on this type of labour. But as it becomes clear this labour can be replaced with cheaper automation, we just switch to see the other side of the coin; one employees in other industries have seen for a long time. As an employee, you're a human resource, a cost-center, and without proper labour protections, you get treated as such.
Mark Zuckerberg has also always been like this. Not with the engineers back when they were more special, but with the content moderators for example, who have long been considered "replaceable". plenty has been written about how terrible it is to work in content moderation at Meta, the quotas, the little thought given to doing a good job, to mental health, etc. As engineers keep getting less special, they'll keep seeing the face of Zuckerberg that exploits resources, decreases cost, and demands higher margins.
> I am flabbergasted that I am a lowly peon in the machine, and yet unless I'm missing something, I seem to be a lot smarter than most of the people I see running these companies.
This has also long been the case, especially in other industries. I can assure you an average barista at Starbucks knows more about making good coffee and keeping customers happy than the CEO.
Credit where credit is due, the CEO probably does know more about playing the politics, pleasing investors and how to ruthlessly optimize organizations.
Fortunately for me, he's not senior enough to make my life miserable. But if he ran our engineering org I have no doubt he'd inflict many of the same problems the source article describes on us. Reassigning software engineers to data labeling has all the hallmarks of an idea that came through this process; any human manager would immediately identify the obvious, showstopping problems with it, but to an AI whose experience of the world is exclusively mediated through written text it's not so obvious.
To me this reads like a personal resistance to feedback / resistance to behavior change or a very jr eng more than agent related. Code isn't sacred — LLMs often easily generate absurdly overcomplicated garbage spaghetti code, but this appears to be getting better, and they are "steerable" towards better outputs with a few rounds of revisions, and some light process around a light spec, TDD, etc.
It'll sure be interesting to see where this goes in the next year or so. The companies that have flamed out due to C* AI Psychosis. I'm sure the next set of "startup leadership" books will be around "how to avoid AI psychosis" and/or "how to use AI psychosis for fun and profit!"
The difference here is that this particular wave of propaganda hits people whose actions have deep effects on their industries, so their unreasonable actions are far more visible.
We already know what the algorithm does to normal people - it should be treated like a radioactive object by anyone in charge of anything. Very powerful and strictly used judiciously and in small doses. Instead we've got some of the most powerful people on earth just cooking their brains on this shit just like anyone else watching reels on the bus.
Maybe we should tackle the "wealth is transcendence" psychosis first.
This stuff is putting an expiration date on your domain experience, and leadership is salivating at the chance to cut OpEx.
At bare minimum, every PM is soon going to be able to do your work. That's a huge talent pool to draw from. This also opens the door to easy offshoring.
They'll use layoffs to get rid of the existing high salary earners and backfill with new hires earning 70%, then 50%, then...
I can't believe how many of you are absolutely certain you're going to be working in software in ten years. Let alone five.
This is the kind of comedy I can only get on Hacker News
Hah, it would be easier to replace the PM with the engineer. Synthesize customer requests? "Competitor research" via google search? Some half-imaginary projection of how a given feature will affect usage rates?
All of those are dead-simple to do with a model and are often un-falsifiable enough that if they're a bit wrong, it won't be noticed. Whereas a PM struggling to figure out how to debug something running in product or to keep the agent from making a destructive change while doing so would be MUCH more noticed.
> I can't believe how many of you are absolutely certain you're going to be working in software in ten years. Let alone five.
In that future, almost every other role goes away faster+harder. Even the vaunted entrepreneur: "just start your own thing and solve customer problems directly" isn't needed when the customer solves their own problems!
"I'll be fine since I'm a good enough engineer" may be wrong, but "the engineers are gonna be fucked but me/the PM/the CEO/whoever else" is even less plausible.
I also question your claim that “everyone hates software engineers,” because I find they’re reasonably well liked in general. Perhaps you’re assuming what I meant was something like “if someone is good at software engineering then they’re smarter than all other knowledge workers,” which is blatantly not true (and indeed, not my point).
How is that going to work? People going to see a movie advertised as starring a well-known actor will be lured to see a movie starring unknown AI models?
Sure you might be able to have PMs deal with the easy stuff for a short while.
But will the company that can hire more competent people pull ahead? Probably.
I can tell you one thing: I haven't worked with a PM for like 5 years.
From the evidence so far, this isn’t true, see the reports above from people inside Meta and other companies heavily leaning on LLM use.
Perhaps you’re suffering from AI psychosis and the imminent singularity is just a dream?
what else do you expect people to do? give up and preemptively go back to university for massive debt and become a doctor? get into long haul trucking? Programming is and was a great job for a middle class lifestyle, needing only smarts and nothing else. No connections, social skills, even location wouldn't hold you back that much.
No, a lot of people will ride the train all the way down.
Statistics really is a bitch.
Sometimes they do know the work being done and how it makes them money. But they want MOORE and having engineers putting dampers on their latest wishes (this will break prod, what are the requirements,...) is something they truly dislike.
We have this at work, it's insane. Today I used opus high thinking to write a jira ticket for simple API endpoint. Every code change, every bug fix, every single code review, I have to utilize AI because managers will complain how we are not using AI enough. Every single person in my team have performance goal to increase AI usage.
At least meta will use employee prompts to train an LLM, so maybe it makes sense for them in the long run. We are not training models, only consuming external LLMs.
That's possible, but don't underestimate the cleansing power of a huge market crash. I don't know how it'll shake out, nobody does, but I'd bet in a few years hardly anyone will be looking back on the gung-ho AI thoughtleadering of 2026 as anything other than a stain on history.
Something that can be useful but being over-reliant on especially at a management level, could be disastrous.
If it goes as bad as it might, it will affect many more people than just technologists. Most people's one and only experience with AI will be when it fails to deliver and wipes out their 401(k). That scenario, I think, would leave a pretty bad smell around AI.
If otoh the industry does find a way to make it print, or if I'm just totally wrong, this won't happen. I hope that's the case.
Which I understand people believe, but at least consider the possibility of the CEO being fired (and staying fired) by the board.
What ended up happening was that the AI ended up tricking the board of directors by buying back the company for itself.
You find this out by poking around the abandoned offices of the company and read the emails on the computers. The whole reason you interact with Delamain is that it is basically using your human help to do some tasks that it can't do as an AI (fairly compensated, Delamain actually seems like a pretty stand up AI, and the strange legal status of the company is ignored by authorities because so many people depend on the service).
That scenario is starting to seem highly plausible as long as someone is sets up something badly enough.
How wild would that be if in 20 years it turns out one of the main jobs destroyed by AI is overpaid CEOs? A man can dream...
I've been fortunate enough to have worked on multiple AI intensive engineering teams (both on the product and research side) where considerable effort was spent reasoning through how AI was changing things and we were consistently evolving our practices. But they've all been orgs with 50 people less.
AI psychosis seems to effect very large tech orgs in a different way than small, high impact teams.
In small startups, at the end of the day, if the team doesn't ship a quality product, the company fails. Most importantly, every individual still bares the responsibility of their work. Personally, I've seen a lot of thoughtfulness around things like bad PRs because, on good teams, people realize we're all struggling to figure this out. But nonetheless, if something doesn't go well, there's always an individual that needs to figure out how to make it better. Virtually all the things I've learned about functionally shipping products built with and using AI have come from teams like this. Software engineering is changing, but for those of us shipping products, it reminds me a lot of the early webdev days when we were all trying to figure out the patterns to make this new world of software work reliably (anyone who recalls the pre-jQuery JavaScript days will remember how much we had to figure out before webdev could become what is today).
In large tech orgs there's a much, much larger disconnect between employee effort and concrete value delivered and similarly much larger diffusion of responsibility. When accountability is abstract and nobody is quite sure what the real value of their work is, then there is fertile ground for AI psychosis to run amok. In part this is because there is a certain latent psychosis in these larger orgs anyway; who's "productive" and what's "valuable" always requires a bit of imaginative story telling, not necessarily grounded in reality.
However, I don't think this will persist long as the "new normal". Just like in the rise of web application development, smaller teams will charge ahead and figure some of this stuff out. The MVC pattern applied to webapps, increasingly powerful JavaScript frameworks and best practices, agile practices, git and the popularization of github, the use of No SQL for scaling etc all primarily where battled tested by smaller, high velocity startups and now lay a foundation I'm sure some contemporary devs don't even realize needed to be built by anyone.
It was the engineers at the ground floor who I watched become religious about it. They have been the ones pushing for deeper and deeper tooling. They have been the ones convincing leadership that this is the future and so now, well, it's leadership who is saying, we want more adoption.
This psychosis is happening at every level in our industry, and this isn't a big tech, or leadership problem. It's all our problems.
The look-at-this-crazy-revenue-faucet period resulted in a LOT of constant hiring for a solid decade. That's not the way towards an efficient org.
So even if they fuck over 70% of their expeienced staff and are left with a relative skeleton crew, they'll likely be able to keep the lights on and keep the advertising-revenue-faucet running for years.
And... given that they've mostly failed to break much of any new ground despite all the previous hiring, the rest of the world probably won't care.
(Plus, as the article itself notes, Meta has long had a pretty toxic perf-review culture; speculation about if that has to do with the lack of any particularly noteworthy new products/features/etc is left to the reader ;) )
Which is absurd, because sales is linear whereas engineering is sublinear.
the new normal for our industry