Psychosis means inability to distinguish the real from the not real -- delusion. I don't think the article describes that, at least not in a literal or clinical sense. The author lifted a term usually applied to people who fall in love with chatbots and applied it to the context of software developers not understanding AI coding tools, and the limitations of those tools.

AI coding swept over the software industry faster than most previous trends. OOP and its predecessor "structured programming" took a lot longer. Agile and XP got traction fairly quickly but still took longer than AI -- and met with much of the same kind of resistance and dire predictions of slop and incompetence.

AI tools have led to two parallel delusions: The one Mitchell Hashimoto describes, and the notion that we (programmers) knew how to produce solid, reliable, useful, maintainable code before AI slop came along. As always with tools that give newbs, juniors, managers some leverage (real or imagined) we -- programmers -- get upset and react to the threat with dire warnings. We talk about "technical debt" and "maintainability" and "scalability."

In fact the large majority of non-trivial software projects fail to even meet requirements, much less deliver maintainable code with no tech debt. Most programmers don't know how to write good code for any measure of "good." Our entire industry looks more like a decades-long study of the Dunning-Kruger effect than a rigorous engineering discipline. If we knew how to write reliable code with no tech debt we could teach that to LLMs, but instead we reliably get back the same kind of mediocre code the LLMs trained on (ours), only the LLMs piece it together faster than we can.

With 50 years in the business behind me, and several years of mocking and dismissing AI coding whenever someone brought it up, I got dragged into it by my employer. And then I saw that with guidance and a critical eye, reasonably good specs, guardrails, it performed just as well and sometimes more throroughly than me and almost all of the people I have worked with during my career. It writes better code and notices mistakes, regressions, edge cases better than I can (at least in any reasonable amount of time).

AI coding tools only have to perform better -- for whatever that means to an organization -- than the median programmers. If we set the bar at "perfect" they of course fail, but so do we. We always have. Right now almost all of the buggy, insecure, ugly, confusing software I use came from teams of human programmers who didn't use AI. That will quickly change and I can blame the bugs and crashes and data losses and downtime on AI, we all can, but let's not pretend we're really losing ground with these tools or that we could all, as an industry, do better than the LLMs, because all experience shows that we can't.