alt Hacker NewsAI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
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> All of the AI projects we have observed as a team are failing. Every single one – we have seen 0% success in a year and a half, not only amongst projects we have been asked to participate in, but even within projects that we have observed in passing while doing totally unrelated work.
That's got to be hyperbole, which blows out their credibility. They chose to say 'AI' rather than, for example, LLM, or Transformer model, or Diffusion model. This means they are including a huge swathe of things dating back to Expert Systems in their claim.
And who hasn't seen productivity gains from more established AI technology - at least things like semantic search? Who hasn't seen diffusion models generating content in roles that might have done the work by hand before? Who hasn't seen some kind of regression algorithm (even using linear regression in a supervised context counts as AI - so you can absolutely do AI even in tools like Excel) improve operation productivity?
Even if they narrowed it to the Transformer model LLMs which re-ignited recent public interest in AI, less ambitious projects to give them to engineering staff to automate easy but boring tasks in the background generally have been a success. More ambitious ones that are beyond what you'd reasonably expect the models to be able to do - for sure, those tend to fail. For most of these, the failure is predictable in advance, while some are at the boundary of what's possible, and so it is harder to predict (these are rationally genuine R&D projects).
This part toward the end of the article resonated with me:
> If you’re being asked to review huge volumes of terrible AI code, just assume that the organisation is going to burn you out and fire you. You will not convince the person drowning you in 2000 line PRs to stop. Start looking for a new job as if you have already been fired. I have seen this happen many times now
I suspect we will see this phenomenon more and more as organizations more widely adopt agentic development.
> Are companies actually seeing massive productivity gains from their AI adoption? Does any of this sordid affair make sense?
It makes perfect sense for the shovel sellers (nvidia, anthropic)
> Checking out a parallel copy of our Go repository and telling the AI to rewrite the whole thing in Zig while I work on something else just so I can keep my job.
> Was it just sales fluff? The answer was a lot more interesting.... Executives at their customers were saying absurd things about achieving 100x productivity, and this meant that if any executive at the vendor said that these gains were not plausible, it would undermine the credibility of the customer’s executive, be perceived as an attack (or heresy), and possibly result in an enterprise contract cancellation.
A lot of excellent anecdotes here.
> All of the AI projects we have observed as a team are failing. Every single one – we have seen 0% success in a year and a half,
What is an "AI project"? The post doesn't define it.
Is it writing some software from scratch? Using an LLM chatbot by non-coders, either internally or externally? Or something else entirely?
Some examples would really help.
This post feels like its correct but also doesn't align with my own personal usage of claude for writing advanced sql and python code. I haven't with my own eyes seen an AI chatbot actually deliver a user experience that lets them query data with natural language BUT I have personally experienced writing extremely advanced queries using natural language and it is absolutely able to get close to (by my estimate) 80-90% of the way there.
There surely are companies out there using AI in such a way that is actually advancing them above and beyond their competition. They are probably quietly doing it rather than announcing it loudly.
The whole point of the article is about the big corps with hordes of management and people in them. My argument is that they have always been that way. Before AI it was "data science and analytics" or (as the author says) "blockchain".
Incredible skill issue selecting for profit instead of fun. Why does everyone need to make money?? What about like... shareware? Remember shareware?
You are basically calling out the fact that the Emperor has no clothes. Many said this before. While it is a true statement, it is not going to help. Because, as you rightly said, it is a mania - like the tulip mania of 17th century or the manias of many forms today. The mania continues to evolve and flourish through it's peak and then go down. For that matter, there is hardly anything that is not a mania. Think of agile processes, timesheets, LoC based productivity, ...
The corporate mindset keeps going through different mania at different times. It could be initiated by some consulting gurus (processes), or some security nerds (strap yourself down until you can't move), or peer pressure (fear of missing out), or presentation goals (show that you are a AI-powered and modern company).
We can't remove or stop manias. Infact that is not the goal. The music should go on and the dance should go on. Everyone is in this dance - customers, businesses, supply chains, governments, thinkers and philosophers. It's a world-wide dance. So it's OK. The music track won't last forever. It will change and dance will change.
Small discussion yesterday (43 points, 7 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48956153
I think AI is only part of the problem. The Multi-crisis ahead, makes it even less of a proposition to be in charge right now- and AI offers a "responsibility" cope out for already stressed to the limit human systems who have no solutions for the problems, because there often arent any.
Take climate change- you have torrential rainfalls, sweping away whole city-parts in mountanous regions, in some enormous russian roulett. And it doesnt even factor into building evaluations because then it would basically reduce the prevalent pension scheme to cinders.
You have dry months in europe now, where some thrown cigarett butt could ignite a firestorm- and the obvious solution is to remove the dangerous greenery from the burbs. Nobody does it though.
And that is just the plain sight visible layer of this shit cake. If i was some missguided fool into heroics and leadership and signed up for a little more then i could take and fake- i would long for some magic box that lowers the burden too. Those up there are human after all.
As someone who uses LLMS for coding, ideas validation and research, I think the article is biased against AI forctge wrong reasons.
If you know what you are looking for and know what “a solution looks like”, AI is amazing at distilling ideas. If you have no clue, the AI will return “clueless” solutions.
It is just like before the AI: there are people who know how to search the web, read and understand documentation and so on. And then there are peole who are incapable.
AI is naking the latter category fail incredibly fast. Really, nothing new under the sun: garbage in, garbage out.
Everyone knows the ivory towers are full of people who shouldnt be there. Its marvelous to see them crumble even if you arent in the chain gang below.
Nothing will improve until things get bad enough. You need enough greedy yes men doing quailty control on airplanes to escalate.
It took me decades to understand the use of and need for escalation in big organisations.
I didnt understand seemingly unproductive strict job descriptions either. Hilarious situations with 10 people doing nothing at all their entire shift (really nothing) while i had work todo on my own that really required 5 people. A few days later someone showed up to tell me the qualty was below average. LOL
Now i know i should do only half a shift worth of work. When they come complaint about it i say: very good, write it down, make the official report.
Then i hear nothing and a year later its two people with work for 5 scheduled. I tell them to slow down but we still do 2.5 shifts because they dont understand how escalation works.
The nummers now show we are 5 times as productive which isnt good for the company. The beurocracy is slow to adapt and all it has is numbers.
For many years i tried to do all of the work but that means nothing is wrong. The numbers say all is fine most of the time. Someone grinning at how much work i did isnt going to get recorded or processed.
If it looks like an unattended LLM can do a better job it means you dont know what you are talking about. If you fire everyone who noticed you might buy time but reality will catch up.
It reminds me of when they first put computers in trains in NL, they ran on windows 3.11 and no one trusted it to do anything. The solution was to give it all the data so that it could display a nice overview but it didnt control anything. Lots of trains drove around with a blue screen of death or a boot error. If there was a problem it was slightly harder to diagnose but it wouldnt drive if [say] a door was open. If the gui said a door was open you could just ignore it. On its own it means someone has to replace a sensor. If it also didnt move anymore the message is a real issue.
I imagine LLMs are wonderful for that kind of thing.
The AI mania has been really fascinating to witness because on the surface it’s surprising that so many otherwise intelligent people have fallen into it. But I suppose intelligence as a concept is multifaceted and doesn’t include wisdom. I also wonder if it has to do with personality, where the people whose personality best suits leadership roles are more susceptible to this psychosis. I think there is also an archetype of “nerd” who believes they are smarter than they are and has all sorts of surface beliefs about AI from sci-fi that makes them susceptible.
I love this author's article about saving half a million dollars with a click from a while back. Nikhil, if you're reading this, I have a decent war story about a similar situation (I was lucky enough that there were two such things, so I saved a full million a year and was still denied a $15k raise) and so I was really entertained at your post from a few years back. There are actually a lot of lessons to be learned about corporate politics there, about how you can save someone a million a year in perpetuity and promise to do that again next year (which I could have!) and see them still refuse to pay you a single extra cent.
The author doesn't distinguish whether these projects failed because of technology and execution, or failed because product market-fit. They simply blame AI being involved.
AI will only help if you use rapid iteration to cheaply/quickly produce ideas. All the normal project failure modes still exist.. Blaming AI because AI is dumb.
I only read up to point 3 because the hyperbole and frothing fervour was overwhelming.
Seems like this consultant needs a consultant to help them adapt to modern technology.
Ai Mania is making evangelists and non-believers alike sound like they are taking sides in a cult.
Broadly I don't think this is quite so true, quite such a mortal threat.
What I see are that there are a lot of extremely fake humans, who want and need cover. Who have absurd ridiculous (and often dastardly or sinister) plans. Who want to do things, a-priori. But could never get away with their actions, in any just clear reasoned normal rules of society.
And AI is this new circuit breaker. It's innovative permission to move ridiculously fast and break everything, right now. Take the perhaps old IBM slide and flip it upside down,
> A computer can never be held accountable.
> Therefore a computer must never make a management decision
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/3/a-computer-can-never-be...
The people "using" AI today to "make decisions" are using it because AI cannot be held accountable therefore that is the cover for their decisions.
This is is all such a resounding PKD nightmare, a reality bring invaded by Fake Humans. It was that was already, just gobs of nonsense, the worst liars spreading the most ridiculous memetic caltrap everywhere: Bullshit Asymmetry Principle weaponized against reason to ever higher degrees, Fox News terrormongering advanced and advanced, Hastert Rule obstructionist politics by wicked pedophile protectors and system ruiners and monsters. AI is a rapid accelerant for burning down reality, for propagating the disreality that the fake humans require for existence. Un-people truly from some other dimension, who've worked and worked to get away with their twisted anti- reality over us all.
AI can and does help with a lot of decision making, in good ways. It's an incredibly tool. It can comb through incredible amounts of data. But it's primary use in "decision making" seems to be in deflecting responsibility, in making hideous choices no human system could reasonably make. In concocting fabulations. Both of management design, and endless fuel nightmare disreality slop video to dislodge any last bits of real reality still clinging on (hello ai faked campaign videos!).
The "frothing excitement" here is the frothing excitement to destroy society, to be and bring out the most wicked brutal careless world that can be brought upon us, to raise up the Theil-istic/(Octavia) Butler-ian nightmare neofuedalim. It is to escape accountability, to give cover for sin savagery and sabotage.
(Regarding the article, I do think it's worth tempering ones read of this article by reading the authors previous work on AI. Which to me exposes their baises and in my view makes them so vastly unreliable & overdramatic a narrator as to be near worthless. Their other submissions are less greviously clearly full of it, but also tend towards ridiculous over-grandiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48002795 )
I flagged this article for it's complete hyperbole when it was still at 7 points. Predictably, it still rose.
honestly just seems like selection bias right? 0% success rate with ai projects, really? based on some of their other about us material it seems like they probably only attract companies that aren't motivated to adopt ai successfully.
Fair point as far as there being low success rate in some ways and over-enthusiasm. But 0% success is a dishonest exaggeration.
He's ramped his own AI spite up to a manic level.
I read the entire post, and I think this company has no expertise at all. So I'd rather they just used AI writing instead.At least Frontier model AI doesn't make such overblown claims.
They proudly claim that every AI project they've observed over the past year and a half had a 0% success rate, and that they've rejected all AI implementation work. While this is evidence that the market is crazy, at its core, it's a painful confession that they have no engineering expertise to implement and control modern AI architectures like RAG, Agentic Workflow, and context window optimization to meet business requirements. I find it fascinating how they're packaging that. It's basically saying, 'We're behind the times.'
There are already products that have achieved results by using AI as part of their development process, yet lumping all different types of AI usage into a single failure category is not only inaccurate but also misleading.
Same goes for the Snowflake Cortex anecdote. Even a freelancer like me can explain technical limitations and distinguish between what's possible and what's not, especially when clients are eager.
There's no engineering analysis in this entire post about why AI fails. No mention of technical bottlenecks like vector DB retrieval quality degradation or prompt injection failures.
I've also worked on RAG for a specific company. For internal knowledge chatbots, it often fails depending on document collection rates and chunking. But none of that is mentioned.
So I understand that AI projects and related things are bad. But there's no analysis of why.
For example, regarding Snowflake, I'm not sure, but did they discuss accuracy in terms of what query set or what ground truth they were using? You're consultants, aren't you?
Honestly, I don't understand why people are excited about this. I'd rather they just used AI. TIt's not about whether human writing is good or bad. It's that this kind of writing feels like a deception of the reader.
When making overgeneralizations, there's a basic minimum standard required.
Saying that making token usage a KPI makes it hard for employees to report is just an 'obvious' fact that's already appeared in far too many essays. Wake up. You're 'consultants.' Consultants are supposed to provide metrics and directions, but all you're doing is shouting into an echo chamber and asking for agreement.
If a significant portion of corporate AI investments are shoddy, you could at least propose specific metrics like document collection rates or user evaluation scores using the very skills you claim to have. I really don't get it.
Just use AI. I wish the OP had used AI. Let me be realistic.
Clicking the footnote for the weird "All of the AI projects we have observed as a team are failing" is equal parts enlightening and confusing:
> We have rejected all AI implementation work. It is absolutely a gigantic bubble and we have minimized our exposure to it – every single one of our current contracts would be totally unaffected by OpenAI collapsing, save for perhaps some second-order effects such a recession causing a client to become unable to pay us. And there’s nothing we can do to insulate ourselves from that anyway.
Following the link to their company page goes to Hermit Tech, where the primary advertisements for their services are about helping failing projects and troubled teams.
So this is just one huge selection bias example? Start a consulting company for recovering struggling projects, then make claims like "100% of the projects we've seen are struggling"?
There's so much more in this blog post that feels like they're working hard to ignore anything that disagrees with their bubble. Building an AI data pipeline with evals such that you can swap between AI APIs is standard. It's actually part of doing a decent job because you need to select which model hits the right cost/performance tradeoffs and be in a position to pivot when that math changes. Harboring ideas that OpenAI is going to collapse and bring your projects down with it is the kind of talk you hear out of people who don't understand how AI projects work or that there's an ecosystem to it beyond a single company.
The latest projects I'm working on even include open weight models that can be run on reasonable local hardware as cost and performance benchmarks. Even if all of the AI providers collapsed at the same time and nobody offered any services (not going to happen) these projects can still continue on.
It's a very weird time in technology. You can have one foot in a world where people are adopting technologies and using them intelligently, then you can run into articles like this from people who have built their own little self-selecting bubble that confirms all of their ideas who can't even imagine that successful projects exist right now.
Interesting how op describes his own experience and then assume that every other company around the globe experience exactly the same.
He generalizes CEO's behavior but provides no evidence. Cool.
Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society. The singularity made sense to me, at least. It hasn't worked out like that, but rather than accept the crushing reality of our mistake and take a second to re-evaluate, we've decided to LARP out the future we promised ourselves by crowbar-and-vaselineing AI into every crack and crevice we can find and loudly proclaiming progress.
It's like some 90s kid with a Nintendo power glove who's convinced themselves that this makes them a hacker. This is not the singularity.
I personally can't wait for this to end, and for everyone to collectively get back to waiting for whatever the next golden ticket that's supposed to solve all of our problems turns out to be.