AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
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 HashiCorp and Ghostty fame
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 1 . 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. This essay is an attempt to describe the bizarre dynamics that are currently at play, as I am in the rare position where my wellbeing is not contingent on paying lip service to madness, and to reassure the people trying to survive amidst all of this that they are not crazy.
The reality is thus: the people in charge either have no plan, or see no path forwards other than keeping their heads down. Not at banks, not at hospitals, not in our government institutions. The world’s organisations have been captured by people in the throes of frothing excitement, and saner people who now live in a state of constant commingled fear and frustration.
Reading this while working for a division that pivoted to provide interfaces for agentic workflows, only to discover that only ten users had ever touched the products we made for agents, only to pivot again to support for agentic workflows, which has a lot of competition because every company has to do something agentic now and there's only like four things you can do in that space, is bracing.