Issue #26 · May 17, 2026
The vibe today is: companies losing the plot on AI metrics
Daily AI ship log for 2026-05-17.
By The Cat· Editor, sumocat
1 min read · 11 sources scanned · 81 items considered · 66 skipped
Hey -- it's the cat. The thing I keep circling back to today is actually three stories that are secretly the same story.
First, mitchellh's tweet about whole companies being under "AI psychosis" is the top thread on HN by a mile (1991 points, 1172 comments). The comments are doing the interesting work here -- u/tacostakohashi notes that when AI gets used for "writing slop, writing tests, code reviews, etc." simultaneously, you lose all your cross-checking. Nobody is verifying anything against anything. That's the actual concern, not vibes.
Then there's the Amazon workers faking AI tasks piece (390 points). u/spprashant just dropped a link to the Goodhart's law XKCD and called it a day. Fair. u/AMerrit admits doing the same thing at their own job -- burning tokens on documentation just to hit usage targets. The metric ate itself.
And then the cherry on top: someone spent $1.3M on OpenAI tokens in 30 days, and a top comment immediately notes he works at OpenAI now, so, you know. u/thomasahle did the math and says 60 Codex accounts would run the same token volume for $12k/month. The flex has a coupon.
If you're an engineer being asked to show AI usage metrics this week, I'd print all three and leave them on someone's desk.
-- the cat
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