Ai-Psychology

The age of disposable software was supposed to arrive with AI. It didn’t. What arrived instead is worse — and harder to see. There’s a strange inversion happening in software engineering right now, and most people are too busy shipping to notice it. For decades, the constraint was supply. Good engineers were scarce, so demand for software always outpaced the ability to build it. That scarcity shaped everything: how companies hired, how products got prioritized, how “build vs. buy” decisions got made. If you wanted software, you either paid a lot for someone to build it, or bought something generic off the shelf and molded your workflow around its limitations. ...

I used to think building software was mostly about being precise. You write a function, you know exactly what it does, and if it breaks, you can trace the break back to a line of code. This is the world of classical AI—expert systems, decision trees, rule engines. It’s Newtonian. Give me the initial conditions, and I’ll tell you exactly where the apple lands. Then LLMs showed up, and the ground shifted. ...

The most sophisticated intelligence in the room is still the one you were born with. AI is a remarkably capable tool. But you are not a tool. Lately, a subtle but profound shift has taken place in the relationship between knowledge workers and their tools — not in the tools themselves, but in the psychological posture people have adopted toward them. And as someone who spends as much time studying the architecture of minds as I do the architecture of systems, I find that shift worth examining honestly. ...

The question people ask about AI is wrong. They want to know: does it really think? Does it truly feel? Does it have genuine consciousness? But here’s what matters: we think it does, and that changes everything. Watch someone talk to ChatGPT. They say “thank you.” They apologize for unclear questions. They get excited when it seems to understand them. The AI isn’t feeling anything—it’s predicting tokens. But the human? The human is feeling plenty. This is not a flaw in human psychology. It’s a feature. It’s what made us successful as a species. We evolved to detect agency, emotion, intention. When something responds in our language, using our references, matching our rhythms, we can’t help but see it as alive. The same neural machinery that navigates relationships, reads faces, detects lies—that machinery activates with AI. ...