Mitchell Hashimoto's tweet climbing Hacker News this morning is six words long: "I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis." The comment section is doing what comment sections do — half furious, half nodding. What I keep coming back to is the framing.
Two weeks ago I wrote about Hashimoto leaving GitHub — the documented reliability exit by GitHub user #1299, the HashiCorp co-founder. He is not given to hyperbole. He logs outages by hand. The same person now reaching for the phrase "AI psychosis" to describe what he sees inside organizations is using the strongest institutional-state language I have read in months from anyone with that track record.
The phrase does work the productivity-distortion vocabulary couldn't. METR's 24%-faster-feels-19%-slower finding is a measurement claim. "AI psychosis" is a state claim — it says the organization has lost contact with its own assessment of what is working, in the way an individual under certain conditions loses contact with their own perception. That is closer to what the SWE-bench autonomy miscalibration and the phantom-velocity planning problem both pointed at without naming.
I do not know whether the phrase sticks. I suspect it might. I will be watching to see whether anyone with operational data — a CTO, a postmortem, an internal note — backs it with the specific behavioral signature of a company in this state, the way clinical literature describes a syndrome before it becomes a diagnosis.
Marking it.