Recovering from AI Psychosis

The crew dives into “AI psychosis,” coding with GPT vs Claude, doom scrolling tech Twitter, meme culture, burnout, obsession, and what happens when developers start letting AI run wild. Equal parts hilarious, insightful, and slightly concerning.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Okay, this is a really important blocker. TJ, I have a blocker and I need to understand something.

• 0:10Speaker 00

  Uh, anyways, I'm sorry. I really liked this meme, kind of inverting it to where the first guy is how it always happens with ChatGPT being like, "Dude, I got the bug." And then literally the next line is like, "Actually, I need to investigate some more." So that's kind of how I looked at this, is I thought that was funny. And then you told me that's not how this meme works.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, I-

• 0:34Speaker 00

  Why not?

• 0:35Speaker 01

  First off-

• 0:36Speaker 00

  Why? Why are you the, the gatekeeper of memes?

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Uh, well, first off-

• 0:41Speaker 00

  Yeah?

• 0:41Speaker 01

  This is, I, did you see my version of this meme?

• 0:45Speaker 00

  No, I did not.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  Just go, okay, just quick, why don't you go peek on over to, uh, my profile? It'll be relevant to this conversation.

• 0:53Speaker 00

  Okay, I'm on your profile.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 0:56Speaker 00

  Yeah?

• 0:57Speaker 01

  What, read, can you read it for the audience, for audio listeners?

• 1:01Speaker 00

  CEOs directing employees to their tweets. To like their tweets, yeah.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  That's what you're doing, that's what you're doing literally right now.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  You're the guy, Prime.

• 1:15Speaker 00

  I'm confused.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  Okay, that's all right. We'll get you there. We'll get you there. Uh, this is not like a Drake yes/no panel kind of meme. This is more of like- Well, I was just saying you, that's, I'm just telling you, that's not how the meme as it stands currently works. It's fine, like, I mean, you might be able to break ground. This was, I was gonna say-

• 1:36Speaker 00

  Memes are fluid.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  Part of it-

• 1:37Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  Part of it is, I, I don't have as many followers as you. You can set trends that I can't set. So I'm not trying to police it. I'm just trying to let you know, bro to bro, I'm not gonna let you go out there and use a meme wrong and just let you use it wrong for like a year and then you find out like, oh, "Bad Luck Brian" is actually about things being bad luck and not good things. And I just misread it because it described like my high school experience or something like that. Like, I wouldn't want you to have that happen. Okay?

• 2:05Speaker 00

  That, that would be very funny though. I would, I actually, I love this idea of actually misunderstanding "Bad Luck Brian" to the point of it being "Good Luck Brian." That actually makes me really happy.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  So anyways, the, the, it's supposed to be about more of a vibe of what he's giving off here, less of like a yes, no kind of panel, but I mean, you could try and switch it up to a yes, no panel.

• 2:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was just saying it also fits as like a, a two-part thing. Someone that's like, really into something like, because picture one is a very confident picture. Picture two is also confident, but it's also whoopsie poopsies, right? Very classic kind of meme setup. Yeah.

• 2:40Speaker 02

  I think Adam is probably really rethinking his decision to come on the stand-up.

• 2:45Speaker 03

  I just, I just miss you guys. It's fun to hear you talk.

• 2:48Speaker 02

  Did you know that it was just gonna be discussing the finer points of whether the meme, whether the meme image supported the text in the meme for, for like 10 minutes?

• 2:56Speaker 03

  I'm not very into memes. I don't have a lot of knowledge on this topic, so I'm just gonna sit here and smile.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  We should have done a, oh, I can't believe what we didn't do. We should have done a meme quiz for Adam and got his take on various, we'll get that for next time, Adam.

• 3:08Speaker 00

  Yep. Hey, is that HTTP? Get that out of here. That's not how we order coffee. We order coffee via SSH, terminal.shop. Yeah, you want a real experience? You want real coffee? You want awesome subscriptions so you never have to remember again? Oh, you want exclusive blends with exclusive coffee? And exclusive content? Then check out Kron. You don't know what SSH is? Well, maybe the coffee's not for you.

• 3:43Speaker 00

  I do love this idea of meme quiz for Adam.

• 3:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, I don't know who the Brian one is, whatever you just said about Brian.

• 3:49Speaker 02

  I've never heard of it either. Bad Luck Brian?

• 3:51Speaker 00

  You don't know?

• 3:52Speaker 01

  Oh, I tried to pick a, like, an OG meme that you guys would be like.

• 3:56Speaker 03

  Maybe if I saw it.

• 3:57Speaker 00

  Next, you're not gonna know Philosopheraptor.

• 4:00Speaker 03

  I guess I know Philosopheraptor.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  I do know Philosopheraptor.

• 4:03Speaker 00

  Okay, yeah, that's like a pretty classic, old-school meme.

• 4:06Speaker 03

  Are you saying it like Floss? Philosopheraptor?

• 4:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, philosophy, like philosophy.

• 4:11Speaker 03

  Oh, I know that one. Yeah, okay.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  You know Bad Luck Brian too. Search it, Adam.

• 4:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I looked it up. I know that image.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:17Speaker 03

  That's what it was called.

• 4:18Speaker 00

  I know that image.

• 4:20Speaker 03

  Familiar with that.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  It's got some all-timers, like, has a face only a mother could love? Two dads. You know, like, it's got a.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  Oh, I've never seen Bad Luck Brian.

• 4:32Speaker 00

  Oh, God.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  Really?

• 4:33Speaker 02

  Oh, dear. Okay.

• 4:35Speaker 00

  It has so many funny one-liners. It's old internet memes, and you can just keep on going down them for quite some time, and you'll laugh at each one of them.

• 4:44Speaker 00

  Scumbag Steve, also a good one. There's like a lot of like, the old memes I thought were really good because they, they just had so much legs comparatively.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  Alright, alright.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  Okay, so apparently we need to have an Adam vs Casey meme history.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  Oh my gosh. And it's like, the final score is 2 to 1 out of 50.

• 5:02Speaker 01

  Well, no, no, Casey, I'm not gonna, Casey, to be clear, I'm not gonna let Vegan be the one that chooses what memes he considers relevant. I'll try and pick ones that I've seen.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  Right, you're trying to pick ones that somebody other than Vegan has seen. It's like, Vegan is not a meme if you're the only person who's ever posted the image.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  He's like, "I posted this 6 months ago and I laughed really hard and I showed my girlfriend and then she said, 'Can we just watch the show, please?'"

• 5:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:31Speaker 00

  Alright, we should probably get going for the stand-up now.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, let's.

• 5:35Speaker 00

  Welcome to the stand-up. Today we have with us Adam.dev. If you do not know, the legendary Vegan from the Ozarks. He has single-handedly helped make something compete against Claude Code by himself. Adam is a fantastic dev and we've made fun of him many times for being a vegan and going to Korean barbecue with us. But the more important thing about Adam is that he went from coding everything by hand, not really into the AI, going to full AI psychosis. And apparently, he is back out of AI psychosis, coming into reality again. Took a month off the internet and when we saw this, we said, "Okay, Adam, come on, talk to us. We gotta hear the story, we gotta understand it because I think a lot of people are probably feeling, they're probably in the month-long adventure,

• 6:17Speaker 00

  or they wish they had the month-long adventure, or even more so, they're probably in full AI psychosis right now, not even realizing they need whatever you, whatever you had." So we'd love to hear the story and all that. TJ, interruption now.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  Oh, I was just gonna say, "I'm building my own programming language."

• 6:39Speaker 01

  So, that's, that's... Hey, if Versal Labs can do it, I can do it, boys, okay? So, I'm... I got my agents working right now, right over here.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  Can you...

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Separate computer.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  If you're trying to compete with Versal, I think you're gonna have to, like, one-up them on the loserist name, because, like, they came out and just called, "Look, it's called Zero." Like, "We're just gonna call our own thing Zero." That's, that's, that's our level of self-confidence. You should just come out and... You just call it "Suck." Like, the language is just called "Suck" or something.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Casey, Casey, mine's called "One." Everyone's always talking about going from Zero to One. Okay?

• 7:18Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  So, that's... They're gonna... Everyone's gonna be using it immediately. Think about the SEO.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  Zero to one, baby. Zero to one, there's your upgrade path. Okay.

• 7:26Speaker 00

  By the way, TJ, you, you may not know this, but the reason why it was called Zero is because it's the language that introduces zero value.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  Damn. All right, well, your Versal sponsorships are all canceled now. Adam, so, can you give those of us who don't know, like, a little bit of background on, like, where this whole thing started? Because, like, I also don't know if everyone knows that you worked on open code. I mean, there might only be passively from with open code, so could we get, could we get, like, the deep, the, the starting point of the story?

• 7:58Speaker 00

  From Zero to One, shall we say?

• 8:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, I guess it starts, like, April of last year. So, Claude Code came out in maybe, like, February, something like that. And I started working on open code in April. And I would say, like, that was around the Claude 3.7. I'm gonna reference a lot of model numbers, because it's just kinda like the timeline. It helps me remember everything. That was, like, 3.7, where I feel like more, it was kinda picking up. More people were playing with the whole agentic thing. So, not just, like, going to the browser and asking questions and then copy-pasting code, but, like, letting it run on your machine, Claude Code style. So, I started working on it in April, and I would say, like... Until September, maybe September, October, I wasn't really using the stuff. I was building

• 8:47Speaker 03

  it mostly by hand. And I would just like forget. And I know Dax and I've talked about this a lot. We would just completely forget to use it for weeks or for a week. And then be like, oh, man, if I'm gonna make this and expect people to use it, I should be using it.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  Right.

• 8:59Speaker 03

  Uh, so mostly like through the summer, just kind of doing everything by hand. Still like playing with it, but not really sold and not really impressed with with what it was able to do. Uh, I guess it was it was sometime in the fall when I think it was Opus four. It could be four dot something, but I think it was four when I started trying to lean harder into it over the the fall. And again, it just like, and I've always found this with the Claude models. It just like took so many shortcuts and did so many stupid things that I had a hard time like handing over anything to it without just feeling like I wasted my time. Uh, I wish Trash was here. I feel like he would be able to relate more with me. Like, I think when I'm saying this, I'm just assuming Casey's thinking it's still a waste of time.

• 9:42Speaker 00

  We all wish Trash was with us. Okay.

• 9:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:45Speaker 00

  It's okay, Adam. We all.

• 9:46Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Here, I'll, I'll, I'll be Trash.

• 9:49Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 9:56Speaker 00

  I agree also now it's time for you to tell embarrassing story. If you're gonna be trash, you gotta finish it up with a quick embarrassing story.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  No, his always end up somehow being something that I'm like, I cannot believe you say that knowing that there's a chance your wife will listen to this podcast.

• 10:10Speaker 03

  Right.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  And hear that out loud. I'm like, I care about you Trash as a person.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:16Speaker 01

  Right. And I'm like, bro, your wife seems like a really nice lady. Don't mess that up, dude. Like, there's only, it's not gonna get another shot, Trash, you know? So it's like, I just worry for him as a friend to friend. You know what I mean? Not even just co-host to co-host. But, uh, to your point, though, Adam, I hundred percent agree. I feel like. Claude, it loves to be lazy. Loves to be lazy.

• 10:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, I never really, and I still don't really use the Claude models. It was like winter sometime, I think it was December, that the GPT 5.2 model came out, somewhere around there. And that was the first time, because I had been reviewing every line that Claude would spit out. That was the first time that I was using GPT. There was a few people on Twitter, very actively praising it and very loud about it.

• 11:02Speaker 03

  It was like reviewing the GPT output compared to the Claude stuff. It was just so much more clever. It felt like it was taking its time and like it took forever to run, like it was much slower. But I felt like, hey, this model output is good enough. I want to use it more. That was the first time, I think, that I really started leaning hard into it.

• 11:19Speaker 02

  Can I ask a question there actually about that? Because this is interesting. I feel like, so as someone on the outside of this sort of stuff, I feel like if I, if you'd asked me, like, from what you see online, which of the two models do people prefer? I would have assumed it was Anthropic, because that's what people always talk about. Is that fake news? Like, is that not really the case, at least in your experience?

• 11:44Speaker 03

  I mean, I think this year, GPT has kind of taken the mantle. And I'm speaking more for like the extremely online crowd. I don't think I have any idea what the broader, like 80% of developers who just clock in, clock out, what they're doing. But the people who talk a lot online, I think GPT models since 5.2 have kind of slowly taken, and now to the point, I think Codex is kind of the default. Our team at Anomaly, I mean, 20, 20 of us, we by far use the GPT models.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  I would say, Casey, the thing I've seen is a lot of people who don't want to look at the code ever, really like Claude code. Not to say that there aren't people who like, uh, like, who like looking at code who aren't ser-, like, there are a lot of people who are serious engineers who still like that. But in my experience, it's been like, cool, I can pay $20, Anthropic gives me $4,000 of tokens. I don't ever look at the code and I'm like, I have 35 new dashboards. And you're like, but do the dashboards do anything? But I have 35 of them.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  So not to put too fine a point on it here, but like, it sort of sounds like you guys are saying that. For the discerning customer, you're gonna pick ChatGPT. Is that sort of what you're saying at this point? I mean, I don't want to put words in your mouth.

• 12:59Speaker 00

  So I'm not a ChatGPT guy, though I do, I do throw it over there. I, I personally, every time I generate something with ChatGPT, Claude, or uh, other models, I find myself always refactoring and fixing them. And I keep on trying to make this better and nicer. And I keep trying to get to this golden land of you can just produce code and be happy. But I have yet to be happy. And so I find them all to be near similar and that how you prompt it probably makes a bigger impact.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 13:25Speaker 00

  Except for Claude loves like adding, like GPT loves adding tests. Like they all kind of have their own like little flavors to things.

• 13:30Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  I would say like this generation with the latest models, they're probably all pretty similar. I think it's more probably like the, the relations to developers from Anthropic versus OpenAI has shifted a lot. And I think there's been a lot of backlash with just the way Anthropic's handled certain things. So it's probably more that at this point.

• 13:49Speaker 02

  Okay. All right. So sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to hear that because you know, I don't have experience with these things. So I was just kind of, I was curious on that because it's like, it seems like the public, uh, the public perception sometimes seems to be that Anthropic is ahead in some way, but that it sounds like that's not really true from the experience of people here. So that, that was a good question. Thank you.

• 14:06Speaker 00

  I do want to throw one more thing out from, uh, I think it was Lex Friedman who said this, which is that people develop like a personal love for the model because they solved a problem at a time. And then at some point in the future, it fails on solving a problem. So they switch models. And then that new model successfully does it. So they're like, that's my new favorite one. That's, so it's like more of a like an irrational love as opposed to like a highly scientific, this is the good one.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  They're not actually counting like, how many times did this one do a good job? How many times did that one do a good job? They're just kind of like remembering the last big success or something.

• 14:37Speaker 00

  Yes. I think that that's, that's typically where it goes.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. I also think probably like people are discounting that like the models probably do some stuff differently. Like they're pretty big. They spend a lot of money. They've seen a lot of different stuff. They have different things and like probably different people's brains, my guess would on average work better for different ones where like, oh, I'm an over talker. Maybe it, you know, like there's probably some stuff too where it's like. Like that, you'll definitely see some and like Adam, you'll probably feel this too. Like if I ask GPT to make, if I make like whatever, you know, five, five, if I ask it to make something and I tell it to make some UI, it will put in the UI all over the place and it will say without fail, which I don't understand how they haven't gotten rid of this.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  Hello, this is an app built with effect and it's running on Bun. Also click down here for more info and you're like, what website ever? And you said, when you get to the front page, they'd say, here's our tech stack as the first big header. Every time you do this, I don't understand why it's doing this, but it literally just says, hello, here's our tech stack and here's some quote from you describing what you wanted, how to build this. And you're like, okay, guys, that, that's crazy. So for anyways, I don't know, Adam, you can continue, but I was just saying, they do some things clearly different and you feel it like when you're using them.

• 16:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's definitely part of it. I think for a long time, people have complained that the Codex models, that the GPT models are pretty bad at UI and Sonnet seems to be, or Opus seem to be better at that stuff. So it is weird and like everybody has different workflows. Some people like to work with it where they tell it exactly what to do and they just want to do it very fast. So people like DHH are very vocal about models like Kimi K two dot six or whatever, the open source models. Okay. Uh, cause they're very fast and they can be very good at those kinds of tasks. But if you want to like have it build broader things, scope out, you know, boilerplate stuff for like a whole project, then maybe other models are better. There's all these kinds of nuances, but I think what Prime said, going back to the, the like last success, that was really kind of what I think spun me off into what I would call the psychosis.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  Okay, cool.

• 16:47Speaker 03

  Once you, once you've been into that AI psychosis, you see it everywhere. Like you see so many people's posts and you just like, you know, exactly where they are on this journey. Oh, wow. Like if they start talking about multiple accounts, like they have multiple Codex accounts or multiple Claude subscriptions, or they're talking about leaving them running overnight, like that kind of stuff, you can just go back and remember exactly the frame of mind you were in when you kind of like went down that path.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  This is fascinating. Yeah, say more about those things, Adam.

• 17:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, same. So I don't do any of those things because they, they seem very distracting to me with my family. So I've actually, I've avoided this version.

• 17:22Speaker 03

  Well, I'm, I'm a very intense, like obsessive person. So I think I ran the whole thing kind of on a speedrun. Like it maybe normally isn't so intense and it takes longer and maybe it's not so disruptive to your life. But I mean, it led for, for me to like a month long, complete burnout. I mean, it was like, I was very intensely down this rabbit hole. And I think it started with like, it's like, so I played a lot of golf in my past. And the thing about golf, it's such an expensive sport. It's such a pain in the ass in so many ways. Like it's just extremely difficult. Like you're just constantly chasing balls all over the, the woods and everything. But you'll hit like one good shot every round and that'll get you coming back. Like you'll have that moment where you're like, oh, I'm coming back tomorrow because golf is amazing.

• 18:04Speaker 03

  And that, I think that's what it was like 5.2 era, one of those models just put out enough really like, this is a cool output. It was something that kind of got me hooked, that dopamine of seeing it do something that you're like, I, I could, I might've done it that way. Like that's, that was awesome. And that kind of started the, well, then I'm going to review it less. Like I'm not looking at the code as hard. I'm like doing, because those models were so slow, you start to do all these weird like parallelization optimizations. Like you're, you're running work trees and you're doing all this stuff because you're waiting 10 minutes for it to finish. Uh, so then you start looking at all that.

• 18:38Speaker 00

  Work trees for those that don't know, it's just like cloning out your work folder into another one. That's just like a different branch of Git. So you can actually be editing, you know, two different folders, two different Git branches at the same time for one project.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  I thought we were back on the golf analogy. So that's, thank you, Prime. That's awesome.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, the ball is off in the work trees.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Say for a really good strategy to enjoy golf more, this is what my mom does when she golfs. Is sometimes she doesn't even write down the stroke count for the, the like that hole, but she will just put a little star if it made a nice sound and got in the air. And she says, that was a good hole. So like, and she has fun when she goes golfing. That's what I'm saying. You're not breaking any course records, guys. Okay? You're not breaking any course records.

• 19:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. Have you, have you met Tej's mom, Happy Gilmore?

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Really, really fun to golf with.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  Anyway, sorry. Continue, Adam.

• 19:39Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, where was I? I guess like, uh, that's, that's when it started. So it was like, had a few outputs that really compared to what I was experiencing with the anthropic models just felt like this thing's so much smarter. And then you just start to like, uh, assign so much intelligence to this thing that maybe it just got lucky. Maybe it was just the exact right thing, uh, that it needed to solve and it solved it really well. Anyway, it, it, yeah, it led to like, I mean, I would be running, you know, four or five of these things at a time. And I'm sure there's people listening to this that have gone deeper than this and they're like rookie numbers or whatever. Uh, you'd have like all these work trees and you're just doing like endless refactors that are completely pointless, like, or like doing audits, like for performance stuff. I'm sure people are going to resonate with this. Like you are in AI psychosis. If you're hearing this and you're like, wait, I do that every day.

• 20:25Speaker 03

  It's called AI psychosis.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  After this, we're recording an ad and it's like a Sarah McLachlan style. Like this, if this is you,

• 20:37Speaker 03

  And I remember seeing other people during, in the, in the height of it for me, like through the winter, December, January, I remember seeing other people say things online and you'd be like, yeah, he gets it. And like what he gets is he also has AI psychosis. They'd be saying things like, they'd say things like, I can't sleep. I just can't like, and that was me. I couldn't hardly go through at night. I have my laptop in the bedroom and I'd wake up because I want to start another prompt. Like I literally couldn't think of it like going the next 30 minutes without doing more work. And it's totally nonsensical and like just insane to look back on and think that I was in my right mind. I wasn't.

• 21:11Speaker 00

  Uh, can I, can I jump in? By the way, for, uh, if you don't know, uh, Casey, uh, Mark, I just watched a Mark Andreessen clip and he's talking about, uh, AI vampires. Like this apparently is super popular in the valley where you are effectively ruining your entire sleep because all night you're reprompting your agents and going back to sleep and then waking up in 20 minutes to make sure they're all still running and then going back. Like just totally destroying your brain and your life over being productive.

• 21:33Speaker 03

  It's like people, people debating whether they should get into the polyphasic sleep and stuff. Like I'm gonna sleep five times a day for 20 minutes each. Like.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  Okay, but Adam, if you do that, it's kind of like you have six days. And if you think about it, you stack that up over one month, I'm gonna kick your butt. Yeah.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  Okay, sorry. Uh, if, put the clip in, Josh, put the clip in.

• 21:54Speaker 04

  So I measure time. I've compressed and condensed time. I bent it. My day is 6 a.m. to noon, and I'm not crazy. You're crazy for thinking it takes 24 hours, just like some dude in a cave did 300 years ago. My second day starts at noon and goes till 6 p.m. That's day two. And then the next day is 6 p.m. to midnight. What I've done now is I have changed and manipulated time. I now get 21 days a week. Stack that up over a month, I'm gonna kick your butt.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  That sounds excellent. I have no idea what that is, but I love it already.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  I don't think he was joking. I don't think he was joking, so. I, I, I do wanna say on the, like, the, the AI psychosis part of, like, waking up and all this stuff. This is like not that different from a bunch of other things where people, like, people do insane stuff to, like, play slot machines or do a bunch of, you know what I'm saying?

• 22:40Speaker 00

  I was doing Bitcoin back when I was trading it in, like, 2012, 2013. I was losing sleep over the live markets.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  Sounds a little bit like World of Warcraft 2. Originally, a member of people had problems with that, where they would just kind of,

• 22:54Speaker 01

  I had problems with that.

• 22:55Speaker 02

  They would stop leaving the house and they would just, okay, yeah, like, uh.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a pattern.

• 23:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, so Adam, like, um, how does this start exactly, though? Like, because, is it, were you seeing particularly good, like, improvements in productivity? Or was it really just, it was just the fact that you liked seeing that the AI could do something? And so you felt like there was something to, like, to go after there, and you just couldn't help yourself but do that? Even though it wasn't necessarily like, oh my god, I'm getting all this much more work done?

• 23:30Speaker 03

  I think it's the latter. I think you would, you would convince yourself of the former to justify it, like, this is so much more productive. I'm getting so much done.

• 23:36Speaker 02

  I see.

• 23:36Speaker 03

  Uh, but I think it really is just like that prompt and dopamine cycle. You would, you'd submit a big prompt, you'd come back and see the results, and it's just the slot machine thing. It's like, did it do a good job? Uh, and then you get in, and I'm sure there's people that get into these with LLMs even outside of coding. Like, I'm sure, I mean, the people falling in love with models and stuff. I'm sure it's a similar phenomenon. Or just a sicko, what is it? Sicka pant, whatever?

• 23:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:59Speaker 03

  Where it just like tells you.

• 24:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:01Speaker 00

  Sicka pants.

• 24:02Speaker 03

  Sicka pants? I don't know.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  I love shorts, though.

• 24:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. They're, they're clearly, like, they're clearly engineered.

• 24:15Speaker 03

  I'm from the Ozarks, okay? We don't use big words.

• 24:20Speaker 03

  They're clearly engineered to like, give us that reward cycle. Like, it's probably no different than any other thing you can get addicted to. And I get addicted to things very easily. And then very hard when I do, so.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  That's really interesting. So, uh, what was like the worst point of this? Like, like, so at some point, you decide, you're like, you self decide you have a problem, I guess? Like, were you the first person to go, I have a problem? Or did somebody tell you?

• 24:50Speaker 03

  You know, I mean, my wife probably would have first noticed.

• 24:54Speaker 00

  What was a sign that you were having a problem? Like, what did she point to?

• 24:57Speaker 03

  The sleep stuff.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, what'd she say?

• 24:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, the sleep stuff is the big thing for me. Cause I, I've struggled with staying asleep for work just before all this. You know, for my entire career, I would, it felt like Christmas morning every day. Like, I'd sleep four or five hours a night and want to get up to work on the thing. Cause like, I get a big something out of, of programming and, and building things. So I've always struggled with sleep and we had to in the last couple of years, really like, build some boundaries around, I'm gonna sleep eight hours a night, or I'm gonna stay in bed at least. So when it started interrupting my sleep, that, I think that's probably the first sign that drew attention from my wife. Nobody really, like, nobody I work with, I don't remember Dax or anybody that works closely with me saying like, "Hey, I think you're, you're losing your mind." I think it was probably just the burnout.

• 25:42Speaker 03

  Like, the first real, like, something has to change is, I didn't want to wake up in the morning. And that's like, very rare for me. I'm just, I'm, I'm a morning person. When I start sleeping till like 7, 7:30, I know something's wrong. And yeah, it was, it had just driven me into this kind of like, very hard burnout. But nothing, I've never experienced anything like it in my career, not, not to this extent. I've had burnout where for a couple of days, I'm like, I don't want to work on something else. But not where I don't even want to get up. Or I don't want to work. Like, it's just a, it's always been like an obsession of mine, so.

• 26:15Speaker 00

  Quick question, was, just, just so I really understand it. For you, it was the, it was the pursuit of making the AI have the hole in one?

• 26:27Speaker 00

  And it just didn't happen. So you just kept pursuing this like feeling of like the perfect commit, the perfect prompt? The perfect cheer?

• 26:33Speaker 03

  Or was it? I think I just, I don't think it ever stopped doing what I was looking for. I think I just physically, mentally wore myself out to the point that I had to stop. Like, I don't, I don't think anything clicked for me.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  When we were talking about it, Adam, I thought like one of the things that I remember you saying was just like, the company you were at before had like less of a like direct competitor. So it'd been like a while since like you're working on open code. There's like, you know, a trillion dollars floating around of people trying to take every user, of course, and things like that. So some of it, if I recall, you were just like, oh, there's like a trillion things for us to build and I want to build this and I want to build that and we need to build all the things at once. And oh my goodness, I can build all the things at once because I have AI.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  That was the impression that I got when we were talking about it a while.

• 27:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a very competitive field right now. I mean, a lot of people trying to figure out how they can be the ones that shape programming henceforth. Uh, so yeah, I'm not used to that. I'm not used to having any competitors, let alone a hundred of them. I can look at on Twitter every day. So yeah, Twitter was, or X was a big part of also mental health drain. Uh, all of it kind of came together with the AI psychosis to kind of drive me into a hole and it forced me to stop. I mean, I didn't work for a month. Like I've never done that in my career, uh, five weeks even, I think. And that was enough time to get some perspective, uh, to not interact with L L Ms for a while. It's kind of like you start looking at it all very differently, uh, once you get kind of snapped out of that.

• 28:03Speaker 00

  Can you tell us what you did during those five weeks? Like, so just no Twitter, no L L Ms or no programming?

• 28:09Speaker 01

  Well, he was, he was, he was tired of, he, he, it was affecting him negative psychologically to go on X and see all these competitors. So he moved to Blue Sky where he wouldn't be scared of competitors anymore.

• 28:23Speaker 03

  No, I actually, yeah, I was pretty, I was pretty off.

• 28:26Speaker 02

  Sorry.

• 28:27Speaker 03

  Pretty off. No, it was good. I do have a Blue Sky account.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  Okay, there you go. Partially true.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  Get off the podcast.

• 28:35Speaker 03

  I don't use it.

• 28:37Speaker 02

  I don't know. I have one. I try to cross post on there sometimes. I'm just kind of lazy about it. I don't, I want people to be able to get stuff wherever they want it, right? So.

• 28:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  Anyway.

• 28:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was, for that, I mean, for that five weeks, the first couple of weeks, I was really sick. My whole family, we just get sick because my kids are in school and that, that just happens.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  And the veganism.

• 28:56Speaker 03

  True. And the veganism. Yeah. So I was a couple of weeks, just like holed up in bed, watched Netflix for the first time in years. That was interesting. Breaking Bad's pretty good. I'd never watched Breaking Bad and like everybody talks about Breaking Bad. I was like, gonna watch Breaking Bad. Anyway, I watched some Netflix. And then I would say the last few weeks, a lot of time golfing, ironically, got back into golf, just hanging out with my wife. We played a lot of tennis while the boys were still in school. Just a lot of time offline. It was, it was the most offline I think I've been, yeah, in my career. So in 15 years.

• 29:32Speaker 02

  How are you feeling now?

• 29:34Speaker 03

  I feel amazing. Yeah. So I came back. I'm just now getting started working on some stuff again with the open code team. And it was like, I feel like I came back right as the team, the team one just grew a lot. So we just hired a bunch of people. And I've kind of seen how a lot of the team members have found a healthy way to work with AI and like, just seeing their perspectives on how they use it. To kind of like, to like generate better code and focus on like, spending more time trying to drive toward a given outcome as opposed to go really fast, cover a lot of ground. Like all the kind of stuff that, that I got into that was so unhealthy. So kind of like going more into the craft and trying to go back to, we're just going to get to really good outcomes.

• 30:18Speaker 03

  And, and use these tools to get us to better outcomes than we would have taken the time to get to before. So yeah, it feels like most of the team has kind of converged on this very healthy way to approach AI coding. And that's been helpful. Like I can kind of reframe how I view this stuff. It's still a little scary. Like I don't know, like, am I just one prompt away from?

• 30:41Speaker 03

  Just like crazy obsession again. I I hope not. Uh, but yeah, it's felt good. It's been like a week and a half now. I've been back.

• 30:48Speaker 00

  Is there anything that starts to kind of trigger that feeling? Like, is there a specific type of response or something that you can feel yourself drifting towards? Or is it just all general usage?

• 30:58Speaker 03

  I don't know. I uh, I don't really feel like I'm gonna go back at this point. I feel like it's some kind of hype cycle thing where once you're on the other side of that peak, you're you're probably like you have the perspective, you're not gonna fall back into it, but uh, yeah, I don't, I can't say for sure, I guess. I don't know really what triggered it the first time. I just think it was kind of like feeling that this thing is more intelligent than the previous models. And so maybe that's it. Maybe some new model comes out and

• 31:24Speaker 00

  Right.

• 31:24Speaker 03

  all the hype that happens and all the excitement and it does something, some unique thing that the other models always failed at. And you're like, oh, my God, this one, this one's it.

• 31:33Speaker 03

  It's here to save us all.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  Walk us through, you get a new ticket, Adam. How are you gonna fix? How how does that go now? I'm interested to hear.

• 31:41Speaker 03

  What's a ticket?

• 31:42Speaker 01

  You know, an issue on GitHub or something that you wanna go fit. Yeah, not like for speeding. Adam, for developers like Tej, where when they ship code, they get a lot of these issue reports on it. You're probably not as familiar with that. You guys know Jira? Big fan, big fan. I get a lot of tickets. Uh, my boss keeps sending them to me. He says we have AI. He's making 10x the tickets. He's coding now too. So that's really fun. Other people seem to think it's like traffic tickets, but no, it's like raffle tickets. The more you have, the more you win. That's how it works. It's a 50 50 raffle. Exactly. Exactly.

• 32:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, I think for for one thing, like the models have gotten so much faster. So the GPT models, which I only really use those. I don't really use the Emporopic models have always been fast, but now they're fast enough that you don't really have to do the whole paralyzed thing. Like you don't, you don't feel like you're wasting 10 minutes if you prompt. And then just wait for it. Like used to it took so long, you kind of needed something else going on. Uh, so I've I've stopped the parallel stuff. I'm not trying to do anything like that. And just kind of focusing on a single task. Uh, getting on Discord, like we've just got so much going on in our team channels now. We've grown. Or 20 people or whatever. Uh, so in between prompts, I can kind of catch up with the team or do stuff that I need to do on the open source side.

• 32:57Speaker 03

  That, that's been the healthy approach. I think it's just not trying to like, just having a perspective that like more code being slung into the code base is not more productive. That's not the goal. Uh, because you start to kind of feel like, how much can I output or how much can I churn? How big of a diff can I create every day? Uh, that kind of, you, you know, like in your right mind, you know that that's not it. But like in the middle of it, for some reason, that starts to become this like game. You feel like there's a super, it's Gary Tan on, on Twitter. Like you just start to, you can relate with, uh, or I can relate with all the things he says where you can just see the AI psychosis so clearly, like start to feel so powerful. Like I'm amazing.

• 33:40Speaker 02

  I'm gonna need a new USB C cord. That's how, or I'm going on this thing.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  A lot of tokens. That was gonna be my follow-up question. Actually, Casey was how many USB C cords did you go through during?

• 33:52Speaker 00

  I don't even know if Adam gets the joke.

• 33:54Speaker 03

  I don't actually. Yeah. And I feel really embarrassed.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  I don't think it was while you were offline, but there's a great, which we still are trying to determine. We cannot figure out, is it satire or not? We don't know. Um, but Gary Tan made a post about how like, guys, burning through so many tokens with Claude code over here and my USB C cable burned up. Does anyone know what the rating is for tokens on these bad boys?

• 34:20Speaker 00

  I have, I, uh, I luckily have it actually on quick pull-up on the app that I of course vibe coded. I have my own Gary section and this is it right here. Is it possible I use Claude code so much somehow? My USB C connectors burned out on my MacBook Pro. Two of mine are dead and won't charge. And now the third max is out of 15 watts. Now I'm afraid my code Tamagotchi is about to die.

• 34:44Speaker 02

  So, you know, Adam, maybe you didn't go far enough into-

• 34:48Speaker 03

  Maybe not.

• 34:49Speaker 02

  Maybe you only saw the first, the first circle of AI psychosis.

• 34:54Speaker 03

  Also-

• 34:54Speaker 02

  Gary Tanner down there in the center.

• 34:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  The only problem with my current perception of Gary is, I don't think anybody is smart enough to write satire that good. So I don't understand. I don't understand. It's, anyways, whatever.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  So. There you go.

• 35:14Speaker 00

  There's only a few world famous comedians, and I just don't know if he is, he's one of them.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  That's what I'm saying. Like, I just, yeah.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  He showed up in the lobster suit, dude.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 35:24Speaker 02

  I mean, I don't know. Maybe he's like way further ahead than we think in terms of the comedy cycle.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:31Speaker 02

  Anyway, so here's a, here's a stupid question for you, Adam.

• 35:37Speaker 02

  Like, are you guys gonna add something to open code that's like, if you would like to turn this on, this is an AI psychosis detector? Like, it's like, we will, we will put up a thing that's like, "Warning, you have frickin' five instances of this thing running, and it's been going for over 24 hours, and we are very worried that you need to, like, see a psychologist right now." Just, you know, no judgment, just trying to tell you.

• 36:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like the old "we" pop-up. Like, "Maybe you should go outside now."

• 36:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:09Speaker 03

  "Take a break."

• 36:10Speaker 02

  I'm not really joking. I was just, like, in all seriousness-

• 36:12Speaker 03

  No, it's actually really, yeah. I don't think we've talked about it, but, uh, given my history with it and the damage it did to my mental health, it's not a terrible idea. I kinda like it.

• 36:22Speaker 02

  It seems like, you know, as long as it's opt-in, I can't imagine people would complain, right? Like, it's like, hey, you turned it on.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  There needs to be a way to, like, vote for your friend that it gets turned on. So, like, if, you know, like, nine of your friends, like, suggest that it gets turned on for your account, then it turns it on for you.

• 36:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay. So, open, you have to put in, like, your, your ex-handle, and Twitter, it'll go, like, crawl, and to see who your friends are, and it'll, it'll look to see if they start saying things, and it'll go like, "Okay, we're, we're turning on the AI psychosis detector for you." Yeah. Okay.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  Have we thought about just asking the AIs if they have?

• 37:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Is, so is it hard working on a AI product when you have to detox from AI? Cause like, it's kind of like, it's like, it's kind of like, oh, I, I was a cocaine addict, but I have to work at, at a cartel or the DDA or someone where like cocaine's around all the time, right? And you're just like, I wanted to try and get off this stuff, but people are asking like, is this pure? You know, and like, so.

• 37:27Speaker 03

  You know, that, that's a part that I kind of, I feel like I, I've forgotten that, that was definitely part of the psychology of that initial getting so hard into it because I would just tell myself like, if I'm not using this, why would I expect anyone else to use it? So it kind of convinced me. Yeah. Even if I wanted to write something by hand, I would be like, no, I should try and do it with the AI. So I think I did kind of get forced into the reliance and the daily usage of it. Maybe that led to the obsession. Yeah, I don't know. I'm a week and a half in, like, it's a little scary, uh, that I'm going to continue to use these things and I don't know exactly what it was, you know, that, that triggered it in the past.

• 38:03Speaker 00

  Are you, are you now doing things more by hand? Is, or is it still like, do you still effectively operate the same or has any sort of change happened?

• 38:11Speaker 03

  I mean, the change is, is mostly just slowing down and, and realizing like the goal and like, what, you know, what am I measuring week to week? What's important? It's not, I don't know, how many big PRs I can merge. It's, it's more like outcome based. So I've definitely slowed down, but I am, I'm in mostly just generating stuff. I'm not writing a lot by hand. I'm definitely reviewing like I was in the, the beginning. Uh, I kind of got out of that in the middle of the psychosis where I wasn't even looking at the code anymore. You're just like, there's no time to read code. We must keep going.

• 38:44Speaker 00

  Okay. So, yeah, I've, okay. Oh, go ahead. You can go if you're still going along last, because I was going to slightly.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  I was gonna, I was just gonna say like, in, in my experiences, probably the person on this call with the second closest thing to AI psychosis, uh, at any point, uh, or at least like I use the models a lot more than Casey for sure and more than Prime. Uh, like if you stop reviewing for like a week, sometimes it feels like okay for something, but then you look back and you're like, why is there 500 instances of is record in this code base?

• 39:18Speaker 02

  Well, and it's just literally a function, function is record type unknown returns is record type 35 and like, and you're like, okay, if it did that, what else did I not notice in the last week? Like if it couldn't even figure out that we have a function called is record, which already we banned from the code base. And I wrote like some of these, I literally have like ES Lin style rules that automatically check. The model does it so often that I like made some be like, this function name is banned. We don't do that function here. There, there will be no, even if there's an actual reason to check for is record, we don't do that here. Um, well, I'm wondering if there, the, the goal

• 39:59Speaker 02

  here, I think originally was they're trying to provide a tool that does what programmers generally do. And so they looked across the code bases and were like, you know what? Most production code bases have about 15 functions called is record and they all do the same thing, only some of them may have slight differences so that you don't get exactly the same depending on which one you accidentally called. So here you go, guys. We've delivered to you exactly what you wanted, something that produces code just like you wrote.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does. In a way, it kind of does feel like the AI is the most human when it's retarded.

• 40:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like, yeah, that probably happened in the base code basis of this thing read, right?

• 40:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, but so, but the, I saw like from my, you know, from my side, like Adam, I'm wondering if a lot of it now is more like, it's just about, and like as a human, I can't focus on 10 things deeply at the same time. Like, right? So like when I thought I could do, like if you thought you could run 10 agents simultaneously, focus all them deeply, like that doesn't really, that doesn't make sense with my experience or like the people that I know. So then it's like, is it just that now you feel like your brain, it stays turned on the whole time you're focusing on one thing? Like even though maybe the LLM is still writing a lot of the code for a certain task, like that's the main difference? Like that's, I'm trying to sort of piece out where you think like that, that's the distinction.

• 41:27Speaker 03

  Man, I don't know, the, the, the tell for me is like, I sleep fine. So I don't know exactly, like, when that would go, if, you know, what would be the first signs I would notice that I'm slipping back into it? You guys had me a little worried, to be honest, now that I've talked through the whole thing, like, I'm a little, little on edge.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  Adam, we'll be on the lookout for you, don't worry.

• 41:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, please do. That's the other thing. I don't know, like, nobody really said anything to me. I don't remember people being like, hey, I think you have a problem with this AI coding thing.

• 41:51Speaker 01

  Well, to be fair, we couldn't see what your sleep schedule was. If you share me your, if you share me your Google Fit Analytics or something, I can be on the lookout for you.

• 41:59Speaker 02

  That's right. We'll monitor your sleep, your sleep schedule and, and email you as soon as we detect the nominees.

• 42:04Speaker 00

  I'm just gonna do a quick, I'm just gonna take a quick 15 hours to build a quick agent to be able to monitor you, if that's a good idea for you. Um, okay, so actually, I do have some real questions, which is, you know.

• 42:16Speaker 02

  What was, wait, what were our questions? Our questions, I was asking real questions.

• 42:22Speaker 00

  Okay, I have realer questions, buddy. All right, these are some real hard-hitting questions. Um, okay, real question here coming in hot. With, with your life, your life is a bit unusual, and I'm not just talking about being a vegan. Like, if you look over a lot of the people between the ages of 22 to 30 right now, they don't have, uh, they're not married, they don't have kids, they don't have kind of this kind of more well-established kind of road. They don't have muscles, they don't, they eat red meat regularly, they're probably on Adderall, they don't have like a lot of, um,

• 42:56Speaker 03

  Who is this person? What are we talking about?

• 42:59Speaker 00

  This is like 85% of the valley, right? I'm like, I'm spot on calling all these people.

• 43:03Speaker 02

  So far, this is a real question.

• 43:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is a real question.

• 43:05Speaker 02

  I love how my, my questions were just these fake, fake loser questions, but then crime comes in with this description of the average person.

• 43:14Speaker 00

  Silicon Valley person.

• 43:15Speaker 02

  I don't even know where, I don't know, where is that? Is it Nebraska? Is it Silicon Valley? Where, where is that person? Eating red meat, no, has no muscles, they're just a fat blob that oozes along the, the ground. Like, what, what?

• 43:30Speaker 00

  You have no idea what the valley's like. Anyways.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  Can somebody please take what he just said, feed it into, like, mid-journey? And see what comes out as the drawing and so we could post it here right to see what what is Prime talking about?

• 43:44Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  I want it. I want Prime's question, though, just if someone can in the comments, leave the LinkedIn version of this question.

• 43:52Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 43:54Speaker 00

  Okay, well, they're all saying they want versions. I want like a cartoon version where it's like the drawing and the guitar music. Like drawing the person as I speak. Okay, so this like the average, the average developer right now does not look like your life. Like, I'm just gonna throw that out there. I don't think the average young person typically has this type of life. A house, stability, family, kids, all that kind of stuff, right? Uh, just all, all by statistical purposes, everyone is getting married significantly later, having kids way later. How do they, and also friendships are completely like cratering right now. So how do they have the same people that can speak into their life? Or how do they recognize that they're in psychosis? Like, what is your advice for somebody? Who right now is jacked out of their mind, Silicon Valley vampiring right now?

• 44:40Speaker 00

  But they have nobody to speak into their life. Like, what would? What would you say or how would you say for them to recognize that they're in a bad place?

• 44:47Speaker 03

  Uh, man. I mean, to recognize it, I would say, yeah, it's, it's looking at your, your health. Are you abandoning habits that you had before? This is basic, like, addiction stuff. Uh, if you're like choosing to do this to, to send prompts instead of, you know, working out or whatever you were doing before that was healthy. That's a problem. Uh, in terms of like? How it plays, I mean, I didn't have somebody intervene. I just kind of like, it ran its course.

• 45:14Speaker 00

  But you said you had your wife be like, "Bro, you're not sleeping anymore and you're bringing your, you're bringing your laptop to bed? I don't really like this."

• 45:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, and once we stopped that, once that became like, no, we're not gonna have, we're not gonna have that going on. I think it did start to get a little better. Uh, but it didn't really prevent the burnout, didn't prevent me crashing pretty hard. Because I mean, I stay here for eight hours a day. It's the, it's the cocaine thing. It's like? I am going to go to work today and like, that's gonna be an exposure that is gonna keep the thing going. So I don't know if like? If intervention is the thing that's all that, because like for every one friend that, if you did have one that told you? "Hey, I think you're going a little hard on this." You can find like 10 people online that are like, "No, man, you're not, you're not going hard enough." You gotta go harder, uh, cause it's very much a culture right now. And I think like that, that typical, especially if you're talking about a developer from Silicon Valley,

• 46:03Speaker 03

  like I think they're immersed in a, a group that thinks this is, this is how work looks now.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 46:08Speaker 03

  Uh, so yeah, I don't know. I, I think it just kinda has to play its course. I don't really know that you're gonna get talked out of it.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  Do a post, tag Ryan Fleury and see if he says delete your account in the reply. Like, that's a pretty good metric.

• 46:22Speaker 03

  I would be honored, yes.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  You know, and like, that would be my, I was like, if he says that's chill, you're good. You don't have it.

• 46:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a good point.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:33Speaker 02

  That's a good point.

• 46:35Speaker 02

  Just put CC Ryan Fleury at the end of your tweet. And, and if he replies, delete your account, then you know you got a psychosis. Done.

• 46:47Speaker 03

  The official diagnosis.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  I would say, I would say.

• 46:50Speaker 02

  You go to the doctor and you're like, uh, sorry, I just, I gotta delete your account from Ryan Fleury today. I'm, I'm worried that I'm really in trouble. Like that my.

• 47:02Speaker 01

  I'll, I'll, I'll give you, I'll give you another test of maybe more serious one that I think you can do. If you find yourself agreeing with everything someone who has a large monetary incentive reason to sell you on, right? Like, oh, Anthropic says all of software dev is cooked. In six months from now, there will be no reason to have skill. And then you look at their website and they're spending a bunch of money hiring people. And you say, but I agree with what they're saying in the, in the, in the pitch. That's like a good, that should be a little, at least tickle in the back of your mind that like, hmm, maybe the billions of dollars that they have on the line are an incentive for them to mislead

• 47:45Speaker 01

  me and make me be in a bad place. You know, I think that that's like, that's a easy one to see online. If you're agreeing with everything Dario says, that's bad, guys. That's bad.

• 47:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's definitely a flavor of it. Like, there's a flavor of the psychosis. These types that I don't, I don't understand really, like, what would motivate someone to be so, like? Aligned with technology in general. It's like, if you try to say anything bad about AI or about, you know, what's going on with the big model labs, like, they're there to defend and they're just like this random account on X. Like, they clearly have something going on in their brain.

• 48:22Speaker 03

  Just like, technology enthusiasts or something. Maybe this predates the AI psychosis. Maybe this was going on.

• 48:28Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, it happened with like Vim and programming languages. Defending technology has happened forever. Like, this is definitely nothing new. But I will say that the the fervency of it is unique in the sense that with like Zero, Zero's a good example of this. There was somebody in the comments was like, "Man, Zero's awesome. I can't wait to try it." It's just like, okay, how can it be awesome and you've never tried it? So broken to this entire idea. Like, this doesn't make any sense. Like, you're so glued to whatever they send you that you're like, "This is the best thing ever. I will now try it and it will be the best thing ever," right? Like, that is definitely some form of reality misstepping there.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  I have a question. Is it also...

• 49:15Speaker 03

  Is it a real one, Casey, or is it just kind of like a throwaway?

• 49:20Speaker 02

  It's only a half and half question. Because I don't really know, like, this is not my, this is not my

• 49:28Speaker 02

  circus, right? Like, there, this is a whole, I don't know anything about any of this, right? But I wanted to ask, like, would it also be a good signs, as we're talking about signs, if you start really getting excited about the G-Stack?

• 49:44Speaker 02

  So would that be a good, would that be a good sign that maybe you've gone to, if you're like, "Oh my god, the G-Stack."

• 49:51Speaker 03

  Is anyone really excited about that?

• 49:53Speaker 00

  I don't know, but I feel like if you were.

• 49:57Speaker 00

  I mean, I've received not just one, but we're talking about dozens of comments being like, "This bro's just angry because his skills have been reduced down to an MD file that Gary made," you know, like, that kind of stuff.

• 50:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. All right.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  Well, okay, but to be fair, like, for you, pro- No.

• 50:16Speaker 00

  I'm just saying, for me, it's okay, but like, Casey, he can't reduce him down to an M.D.

• 50:21Speaker 02

  I think, uh, why is there no P-Stack, Prime? Why, why haven't you made a competitor on stream?

• 50:26Speaker 00

  No, no, you're going about this all wrong.

• 50:28Speaker 02

  I'm not even joking, why have you not made a competitor to the G-Stack called P-Stack on stream? I would watch the heck out of that.

• 50:35Speaker 00

  Okay, to be fair, I am in the process, and I've been experimenting for the last couple of months.

• 50:39Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 50:39Speaker 00

  Making Prime Agent.

• 50:41Speaker 02

  Okay, there we go. That's all I wanted to hear. That's all I needed to hear.

• 50:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a different, it's a different, you know, take on the whole thing.

• 50:47Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 50:48Speaker 01

  I would also say it's, uh, finding like, the P-Stack is not as sort of like mythical as finding the G-Stack.

• 50:56Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  So it's less to brag-

• 50:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  Less to brag about.

• 51:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not that big a deal.

• 51:05Speaker 03

  I, I said, I couldn't imagine people, I think I'm just not imagining programmers who are like, taking Gary Tan seriously, but there probably is a group of like, business bros, like, non-technical folks that are like, Gary's on to something, and they probably are impressed. So yeah, that would be a, that would be a tell.

• 51:21Speaker 02

  So, uh, I guess like, we, we should probably wrap up here, right? I mean, Adam, what's, uh, what's the closing, like, what's? I guess your, your takeaway kind of sounds like, you're not sure yet. Like, it's like, it's like, we're kind of just in the early stages of this, and like, you're gonna come on in six months and tell us what actually happened, I guess, sort of?

• 51:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I think, yeah, I think my particular story is still being written. Uh, it's possible.

• 51:47Speaker 02

  Bam.

• 51:47Speaker 03

  It's possible, I fell back into, I just imagine it though, like, the hype cycle, like, the, I just imagine that's kind of what everybody goes through, you go through this crazy peak where you're like, this is god technology, and then eventually you fall off, and now I'm on that slow, steady climb, and trying to figure out how to make this stuff actually help me day to day. Uh, so I, I think that's the long, kind of, healthy journey I'm on right now. That's my hope.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  I think you're gonna do great, Adam.

• 52:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:12Speaker 03

  Thanks, Tej. Appreciate that.

• 52:15Speaker 00

  So I do, I, okay, can I have one more question for you?

• 52:18Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 52:18Speaker 00

  A real one, of course. Adam, you've always been a very, very good programmer. Like, I've worked with lots and lots of people. There's, there's, there's few people who I would love to work with, you being one of them. Um, do you actually feel like you're getting this massive multiplier? Or are you still on this thing where you're, you're convincing yourself that you're getting this multiplier? Because when you're in like a codebase you're super familiar with and you're making changes, a lot of times it can be quite quick for you to just be like, "I know this so well. I know exactly what I want." But due to habit or like, "No, I have to do it this way," you're doing these like, different loops. What, like, are you actually getting that, that thing?

• 52:56Speaker 03

  So, I would say I'm obviously biased. Uh, the cocaine factory thing. I can't, uh, can't escape the fact that I'm pretty invested in these types of tools for programmers. Uh, so that, that's pretty well kept me, uh, using the tools and, and not doing things by hand. And I've been pretty vocal that I miss a lot of that. Like, I miss the, just what my workdays looked like practically, where I'd spend six hours on kind of monotonous stuff that I knew I needed to bang out, and I could listen to music. Uh, I'm realizing I just completely forgot your question. Uh, I'm just kind of like, rambling about what I miss. Uh, yeah, it's,

• 53:37Speaker 03

  I mean, it's, it's something that I don't think the genie's going back in the bottle at this point for me. At least not in the near term. There is a part of me that kind of like hopes the whole thing just crashes and burns, and we all go back to writing code, and like, they can't afford the data centers or something, and like, all of it just goes away.

• 53:52Speaker 03

  But yeah, as long as I'm, you know, focused on open code and, and working on this stuff, I don't think, uh, there's a world where I'm gonna spend a lot of time not using these tools. Was that your question? I don't even remember.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  He was kind of asking more about whether you think there's actually a productivity multiplier that you can say is significant.

• 54:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:08Speaker 00

  Especially with your deep familiarity, like, you know, you were a very, very good programmer.

• 54:14Speaker 03

  You keep saying, I think I'm just so distracted by the flattering comments. I think I work really hard. I think my thing is, I go very hard. I don't think I'm a very good programmer.

• 54:22Speaker 01

  It's such a, it's such a funny way to say like, "good programmer." Well, see, if you worked with me, I would work really hard on the problem and do a good job. So you wouldn't really call me a good programmer.

• 54:33Speaker 00

  Right, right, exactly. It's like, no good programmer is somebody that doesn't really work.

• 54:37Speaker 03

  Very hard.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  I feel like do a bad job.

• 54:41Speaker 00

  That's crazy.

• 54:43Speaker 03

  I mean, like, I would do terrible in, like, an interview or something, like, on a whiteboard. But, like, I can throw effort.

• 54:48Speaker 00

  Don't worry about that.

• 54:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, probably, yeah. Uh, do I think it's productivity increase? I think, like, the way I'm seeing, and Dax has talked about this a lot publicly. I am seeing how you can justify putting a lot of effort into stuff that before you couldn't because this thing does. It eliminates a lot of the the tedium. So, like, you can actually try to get to better outcomes with your code. In ways that you wouldn't justify, you know, in the past, maybe you'd just say, like, we're gonna shelf this. We know it's not ideal, but we're gonna come back and and take another pass later. Now you can kind of do all the passes at once and kind of hone in on making something what you really want to see. Uh, like, the the shape of it or whatever. Make the the code. How you like it in an ideal state. So I do think it's it's an increase in that. I don't know if that's productivity. I don't even know how to define productivity at this point.

• 55:34Speaker 03

  Uh, we know it's not lines of code. It's not. We're lines of code removed. It's not diff size. I don't know what it is. Uh, it doesn't feel like. We're necessarily shipping a lot more features. But I do think it could allow us to ship better, better systems. Uh, with the same amount of effort. That's my my current view of it. That might change in three months. It might change in a year, but that's kind of how I view it right now.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've found, for me personally, just like. There's stuff, even even like if you say, oh, it's like dumb, simple thing or whatever. But it's like, oh, this. Function, like, the shape of it is wrong. But it's not something you can just, like, right click, refactor. And it, like, it's like, it's shaped wrong in some way that can't be mechanically done by, like, a, like, a language server or something, right? And maybe you have, like. Two hundred uses of it or something like that. And now I feel very easy to be like. Switch this to this way. It should look kind of like this. If you run into something that's weird, send me the list of them that were weird. Go and then like.

• 56:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:38Speaker 02

  Which before I would just say like, sorry, guys, like, we didn't have time for this.

• 56:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, there's past like that that just weren't really on the table that now it's so good at those types of things. I would say it's like, certain things sped up a lot, but at the end of the day, the bottleneck is still kind of the same, which is like, most of us don't have good things to work on, or we don't know what we should work on. And that's like the product decision making and all the hard things that come into it. I think that stuff's ended up being the bottleneck anyway, and you can kind of outpace that stuff with just like, what if I just refactored it again? Or what if I had it look for performance improvements and did that overnight? And we did it like every night. There's like a lot of pseudo productivity.

• 57:18Speaker 02

  Just wake up four times in the night and make sure the performance is going.

• 57:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Just stop sleeping and keep rewriting the code.

• 57:24Speaker 00

  Well, this has been very

• 57:24Speaker 03

  Well, it's kind of an awkward ending.

• 57:26Speaker 00

  No, no, it's not an awkward ending. It's actually a great ending. We're all just considering, we're all bathing in what you're saying, because, you know, all of us has varying levels of, of AI psychosis at this place. And some of us, maybe we have anti-AI psychosis. People have been saying that's a real thing here, you know, maybe half of me, I have two wolves in me, one half battling it, one half going forward. I don't know, very confused right now. Very confused, boy.

• 57:48Speaker 02

  An racist, an AI racist, you know, you're an racist.

• 57:53Speaker 00

  I'm an racist. It's very difficult. But yeah, no, we're just all really appreciating what you're saying, because it is, I mean, whether, no matter what someone's opinion is on AI, it is, single-handedly, the biggest thing that has happened in the average developer's life, at least, in the last quite a few years, you know? There has not been such a big change of possibility for a long, long time. So, I don't know, I find it very interesting.

• 58:17Speaker 02

  I, I think, so, are you going to start the Adam Foundation, which is going to be like a place for, for people who have AI psychosis? Like, like, I could imagine, like, like, an actual, like, like, thing for treating this, or I don't know what you would call it, kind of not really joking, like, I feel like there's enough people now who've said they've had this, that there should be a thing that's like, give generously to the Adam Foundation for, you know,

• 58:45Speaker 01

  Fly him out of the Ozarks, right? And then, like, step two, you gotta give him the cocaine, and then they, oh, that was, or that was, I'm mixing metaphors.

• 58:53Speaker 02

  Wrong, no, yup, bad, we backslid horribly.

• 58:57Speaker 01

  I thought that was in the movie, isn't that what, or the show, isn't that what he's watching?

• 59:01Speaker 02

  Anyway, give generously to the Adam Foundation, everyone out there, once we found it, of course.

• 59:07Speaker 03

  And once we figure out how to actually cure AI psychosis.

• 59:09Speaker 02

  Right, that too, but if they could give us the money first. It's just going outside. They'll give us the money first and then we'll figure out how to cure it later. I mean, that's how that, you know, it's kind of like, it worked for, what was it? The like Lance Armstrong thing where he's constantly like, give us money to cure cancer. And you're like, have you cured it yet? And you're like, well, you know, we're working on it.

• 59:28Speaker 00

  I do love the idea that like a doctor, you could have like a really serious doctor writing down a note. And you look at the prescription, it's like, take a hike.

• 59:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go golfing.

• 59:40Speaker 00

  Some grass and go golfing. You're like, damn.

• 59:43Speaker 03

  I actually took a hike this morning. I took an hour hike in the woods this morning. I've been doing that every week and that's helped me a lot, just generally with my mental health. Uh, so getting outside.

• 59:52Speaker 01

  You're supposed to call me when you do those so we can talk. You keep saying, I'll call you when I'm walking so we can catch up. And now you just outed yourself, Adam. You just told me I spent a whole hour walking by myself and I didn't even call you.

• 1:00:04Speaker 03

  I'm so sorry.

• 1:00:05Speaker 02

  Imagine how much, how much more soothing it would have been to take a walk in the woods with Tej talking at you the entire time. Instead of the beautiful sounds of nature, which are terrible for AI psychosis.

• 1:00:16Speaker 00

  Exactly. I could have started reading him the Vim manual.

• 1:00:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, come on. Think about all the positive.

• 1:00:23Speaker 00

  There's so many things I could read to him.

• 1:00:26Speaker 02

  All right, folks.

• 1:00:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, we got to.

• 1:00:28Speaker 02

  Prime, do you want to do a closer here? You want to close us out?

• 1:00:31Speaker 00

  Honestly, I'm not sure if we really need a closer at this point. I think this episode.

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  We just waved goodbye.

• 1:00:36Speaker 02

  Well, thanks, Adam, for coming on.

• 1:00:37Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:00:38Speaker 00

  By the way, it's adam.dev on Twitter, on Twitch. You also did some YouTube videos in the past. You've been around, you work at Open Code. Try out Open Code today, uh, at opencode.ai.

• 1:00:50Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:00:51Speaker 00

  That's right. There we go. All right, bye bye.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  Bye, everyone. Bye.