Mitchell Hashimoto wrote a post on X that I haven’t stopped thinking about.
It’s frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute “MTTR is all you need” mentality: “its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can’t do!” We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can’t yeet resilient systems entirely.
I love AI. I lean into it harder than most people I work with and know. Engineering is genuinely better because of AI. Daily and categorically.
Purely AI written systems will scale to a point of complexity no human can ever understand. For a while it looks fine. Defects close, bug reports trend down, dashboards stay green. Then the defect close rate tapers. Token burn per defect climbs. Eventually, AI changes cause on average more defects than they close, and the whole system becomes unstable. The decay.
AI amplifies good thinking. AI amplifies good engineering. AI also amplifies bad thinking and bad engineering.
When that happens, I expect a new type of consulting to emerge. Call it Inverse AI. An involution. The same specialists who get called for an active breach, or when production data is gone and the backups failed. People who walk into a doomed AI generated codebase, distill out the core design principles nobody bothered to write down, and rebuild from scratch with good thinking and good engineering – using AI.
This time with with humans in the seat where it counts.
The decay isn’t a reason to be against AI. It’s a reason to be honest about what comes next.