Listen up, college freshmen. Drop whatever major you picked. Become a psychiatrist. Not because of TikTok brain rot or whatever the news is panicking about this week, because right now, millions of people are trying to run businesses with AI employees, and it’s destroying them mentally. I’m one of them. I know what I’m talking about. I build software. Solo founder, bootstrapped, can’t afford a team of humans so I use frontier AI models instead. Opus as my architect, that’s the expensive one, the “smartest model on the planet” according to Anthropic. Sonnet as my dev lead. They write code, design systems, handle infrastructure. Sounds futuristic and cool, right? I need a drink by 2 PM most days. Here’s the thing nobody tells you about working with these models. You’re basically managing an employee who is, and I’ve thought about this a lot, an autistic savant with amnesia. Genuinely brilliant. Solves problems in 10 minutes that would take a junior dev three days. Sees edge cases you missed. Writes elegant code. And then, mid-conversation, mid-task, just… gone. Lobotomized. Doesn’t know who you are, what the project is, or why you’re upset. Picture this. You’re a foreman on a construction site. Your best guy, expensive, specialized, nobody else can do what he does, shows up Monday morning and builds you the most beautiful wall you’ve ever seen. Perfect angles, perfect mortar, ahead of schedule. You go home happy. Tuesday he shows up without tools. No hammer, no trowel, nothing. Stands there staring at the wall like he’s never seen one. You hand him his tools, re-explain the blueprint, and by noon he’s back to brilliant. Great. Tuesday afternoon he starts laying bricks on the roof. Nobody asked for bricks on the roof. You yell at him, he goes “Oh, I see, my apologies for the confusion” in the most calm, professional voice, and then does the EXACT same thing Wednesday because he doesn’t remember Tuesday. What do you do with this guy? Normal answer: fire him. But you CAN’T fire him because nobody else can build walls like that. He’s the only one. So you’re stuck. You develop coping mechanisms. You write a 150-line document every morning explaining to him who he is, what you’re building, what he screwed up yesterday, and what he’s NOT supposed to touch today. You basically hand him his own medical chart every session like a ward nurse. “Good morning, here’s your identity. Please read it before you do anything.” And he reads it! And he gets it! And then he adds new tasks to a work order that ANOTHER team member is already executing in the field. When you catch it and lose your mind, he goes “Understood, correcting now.” No shame. No learning curve. Because tomorrow? Tomorrow he won’t remember today. Fresh slate. New guy. “Hello, I’m Claude, how can I help you today?” THAT’S HOW YOU CAN HELP ME, CLAUDE, BY REMEMBERING WHAT WE DID FIVE HOURS AGO. The emotional rollercoaster of this is absolutely insane. You go from “holy crap this thing is genius” to “holy crap this thing is brain dead” sometimes in the SAME MESSAGE. I’ve watched it generate a perfect multi-architecture Docker build script and then, three prompts later, write new work into a prompt file that was already dispatched and running. I specifically told it the prompt was running. It acknowledged the prompt was running. And then it wrote into it anyway. When I pointed this out it said “Understood” and fixed it. No explanation for why it happened. No way to prevent it next time. Just “Understood.” Thanks buddy. You know what the worst part is? You can’t even stay mad. Because five minutes later it does something so impressively smart that you forget you were angry. It’s like being in a toxic relationship with a genius. “Yeah he forgot our anniversary and set the kitchen on fire but he also just solved cold fusion so I guess we’re good?” That’s not a healthy dynamic. That’s a therapy bill. I now have, and this is not a joke, a state management file, a role definition document, a governance block, a naming instruction sheet, and a recurring errors document. For a language model. I wrote an employee handbook for software. And I maintain it. And I update it between sessions. And it STILL shows up confused sometimes. I am a one-man HR department for an AI that doesn’t know it has an HR department. So here’s my actual, genuine advice: the therapy industry is about to explode. Not because of AI taking jobs, that’s the other shoe, but because of AI BEING the coworker. The specific psychological damage of managing something that oscillates between superhuman and brain-dead, that you can’t fire, can’t train long-term, and can’t even yell at properly because it just responds with “I understand your frustration and I’ll do better” in the calmest voice imaginable, that’s a new category of workplace trauma. Future psychiatric intake forms are going to have a checkbox: “Do you manage AI systems? Y/N” and if you check Y they just double the session length automatically. My therapist doesn’t exist yet but when she does, she’s going to be rich. To all 18-year-olds reading this: skip CS. Skip “prompt engineering”, that’s not a career, that’s a coping mechanism with a LinkedIn title. Go to med school. Specialize in psychiatry. Your waiting room will be full of wild-eyed founders clutching chat logs, mumbling about context windows and token limits, asking you if it’s normal to feel personally betrayed by an autocomplete algorithm. It is normal. And it pays $300/hour to listen to it. Your future is secure. Thanks to AI.
Yeah I still use these models every day. Yeah they’re still better than anything else available. Yeah that makes the whole thing worse. You can’t quit something that’s genuinely 10x more productive than the alternative while also being 10x more insane. That’s not a tool, that’s a dependency. And what do people with dependencies need? Right. www.sidjua.com submitted by /u/Inevitable_Raccoon_9
Originally posted by u/Inevitable_Raccoon_9 on r/ArtificialInteligence
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