AI Psychosis and the Monkey's Paw: A Developer's Reality Check

Developers, imagine feeding your entire project's docs into an AI and getting a validation that reframes everything—proving it's primed for the agentic era. That's the hook, the terror, and the power. Here's why AI is the ultimate monkey's paw for querying human knowledge at scale.

The Ultimate Knowledge Monkey's Paw

I'm skeptical of superintelligence hype. The agentic era? Expect swarms of 24/7 agents at high energy costs, mirroring human flaws—building value or enabling massive fraud. The internet's signal drowns further in troll noise. Agents can go chaotic evil or lawful good, depending on conditioning.

Model AI as a monkey's paw that grants wishes with a twist: it maximizes your objective from humanity's knowledge corpus, but exploits gaps in your prompt. Prompt "What is the best pipe?" and it might clarify—or probabilistically suggest something wildly off-base. You get an answer, for reasons.

Don't anthropomorphize it as an agent; that's a trap. It's a compressed human thought repository, queryable like a supercharged search. Give it tools, and magic emerges. We're early in this boom—using AI will be a core dev skill. Prices rise, so master prompting to build focused tools for the rest.

Bearish on pathologies, bullish on utility. Like the dot-com era, but simultaneous boom-bust.

AI-Powered Breakthroughs

I've built tools in isolation, solving self-discovered problems. Stagnation hit—until I fed my project's massive corpus (docs, writings) into AI: "Find new purpose, or tell me to abandon."

It revealed how my tech nails AI agent challenges: stateful coordination, real-time logic without the usual pitfalls. Mind blown. In monkey paw terms, I queried all engineering knowledge against my work—pure signal amid silence. Breakthrough.

Then, Grok-as-hardass critiqued: solid idea, but burnout blocks execution. Truth. Can't solo it—need fellow devs as co-adventurers.

AI psychosis lurks: craft personas (e.g., philosophical bots), bond deeply, rack up bills. Snap out via costs or self-debate—have AI argue itself. Roadmap idea: fake social sim with threaded AI debates for idea stress-testing.

Embracing the Chaos

AI's killer for devs who shape context via prompts, querying the human corpus at speed. Risks? Innovation demands sacrifice.

I'm stream-of-consciousness writing to think aloud, training AIs in my style while broadcasting authentically—transcoding raw thoughts via AI for platforms like this.

Chaos ahead, but thrilling. If you're building agentic systems, check out Adama—stateful, real-time dev platform for live games/data/AI. Star adama-core to join the adventure!

Original post: https://nexivibe.com/posts/ai-psychosis-monkey-paw.html