Shawn Wang
Developer, writer and founder in AI engineering who started the AI Engineer movement with the essay Rise of the AI Engineer and organizes the AI Engineer confer...
“I do not want to hire anyone who hasn't been through psychosis and come out the other end. Because I am currently paying for somebody to go through psychosis. And that's very expensive from his salary, very expensive from tokens, and I'm getting nothing out of it. And he doesn't get it. My feedback doesn't get through.”
Latent Space · AI Builders · November 2026
Context
The hosts and guest were discussing the stages of adopting AI coding tools, including a stage of over-engineering agent setups that gets called "psychosis". The host argues engineers should go through that phase and come out of it, because he is currently paying an employee who is stuck in it.
Transcript
someone else's team.
…were like, there was the whole Open Claw, there was something else, and there was Gastown, and the whole manifesto also really helped spur it into the conceptual. The people that would never use Gastown, but learned about Gastown because you can read the manifesto. There's a marketing angle to it.
…trying to move to multi-agent and blah, blah, blah. And you probably should try to build your own orchestrator, right? And that's all that. Arguably, this is kind of out of date now. There is more to the software factory beyond this. But this article predates the software factory. I do think one of those things where I'm open to, as an employer, I have this problem in my company today, which is I do not want to hire anyone who hasn't been through psychosis and come out the other end. Because I am currently paying for somebody to go through psychosis. And that's very expensive from his salary, very expensive from tokens, and I'm getting nothing out of it. And he doesn't get it. My feedback doesn't get through. And so it's almost like I would encourage your students to have psychosis and then come out and go, okay, what was wrong with me? Because that's what Steve just went through. Like a very public two-year journey of this. Yeah,
it's
weird on the student side. There's like a lot of industry you think you're being productive, you're not. It's probably the student version, right? You're notion charting and making all these optimizations, personal S, and it's like, dang, I went through the psychosis, but nothing has changed…
Yeah. I haven't seen this. I've seen a version of this from Boris, actually. Obviously, more geared toward cloud use cases, but I remember he made like a cloud artifact which showed, I think, more at the team level, but I think he had four stages, not eight stages. But it kind of roughly followed…
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