NOTE: This has been cross‑posted to my company's blog, in case you think there is some use in sharing with someone in a format that looks more authoritative. Link here. I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and it’s impossible to have rational conversations with them about it. I can’t name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out.– Mitchell Hashimoto, of Hashi Corp and Ghostty fame.

geldi. Over the past year, I’ve run point on all of our company’s sales, led the technical components of all but two of our engagements, and over the lifetime of this blog have had something like 300 catchups with professionals from around the world. This has ranged from people on the ground in niche service industries to executives at Fortune 500 companies. Because of this, I’ve had a front‑row view to our collective institutions across both the private and public sector undergoing breath‑taking mass psychosis.

AI investments are generally total failures. All of the AI projects we have observed as a team are failing – 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. Even if you grant that AI tooling accelerates specific workloads, the method and scale of the current investments is senseless. Frequently the failure is not related to AI itself, but rather that companies are terminally bad at running software projects effectively.

The most common version of this is the internally‑facing chatbot, or for the more daring company, the customer‑facing chatbot. For the former, I’ve never seen substantial internal uptake from inside a business. For the latter, my last consumer interaction was with Mitsubishi following an automotive failure, where a very polite robot asked me to describe the problem and promised a call back. I did not receive a call back, andrachadh.