Ev BogueMitchell Hashimoto posted on X this week that he believes entire companies are now under AI psychosis. The line ran to the top of Hacker News in a few hours. In a follow-up, he made the part that matters explicit: he uses AI every single day, he is having more fun than he has had in years, and the psychosis is not the using. It is the outsourcing.
I write this site with AI assistance. I am not the audience for an anti-AI sermon and neither is most of the room. The companies Hashimoto is describing are not the ones whose engineers got faster. They are the ones whose leadership stopped asking what should exist and started asking the model to decide. The Hacker News thread keeps circling one word for the artifact this produces: vibecoding.
Vibecoding has a clean operational definition. You type a prompt. You accept what comes back. You do not read it. You do not understand it. You do not know whether the system you just shipped contains a race condition, a regression, a security hole, or a logic bomb. You moved a ticket. The dashboard turned green. The story closed. Whether the code is correct is the model's problem now, except that the model does not have problems. The model has outputs.
This is not engineering. Engineering is the decision about what should exist and the responsibility for whether it works. Take those away and the title is a costume.
The thread has people on both sides claiming productivity gains. The honest read is that they are doing two different things under one name. One group uses the ghost to compress the boring parts of the work and keeps the judgment where it belongs, with the human. The other group lets the ghost run the loop and clicks accept until the build passes. The first group is faster. The second group is faster too, until the bill comes.
Andrej Karpathy named the ghost intelligence frame for exactly this distinction. Today's models are not animals learning from embodied life. They are statistical distillations of human documents and human practices. The ghost can echo any pattern that already exists in the corpus. It cannot tell you which echoes deserve to ship. That is your job. That has always been your job. It does not get easier when the rate of producing candidate code goes up. It gets harder, because there are more candidates to judge and the cost of judging badly is the same as it ever was.
The companies under AI psychosis are not the ones with AI on the dev team. They are the ones where the CEO read a McKinsey deck, declared the new mandate, and stopped tolerating engineers who asked what the code does. The mandate is the symptom. The vibecode is the artifact. Somewhere downstream, on a Wednesday, a production incident is going to remind a board of directors that nobody on the payroll knows what the system is supposed to do, because the people who knew were either told to ship faster or told to leave.
If you are reading this from inside one of those companies, you do not need permission to keep thinking. You need to stop pretending the mandate is a strategy. Use the model. Read what it gives you. Make the call.
If you are reading this from a company that has not fallen in yet, the move is the same. The cage is not the tool. The cage is the agreement to stop being the one who decides.
Email me at ev@evbogue.com or text 773-510-8601 if your company is mid-trip and you want to compare notes. I am not promising a way out. I am promising someone on the other end who remembers what the job actually was.