Agent Psychosis: Are We Going Insane?  ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Agent Use Is Reshaping Developer Behavior** - Armin Ronacher warns that widespread use of coding agents is changing developer behavior and social norms. - He observes degraded PR quality, parasocial AI relationships, and communities normalizing unhealthy reliance on agents. Transcript: Jerod Santo Agent psychosis. Are we going insane? Here's Armin Ronicher, quote, Many of us got hit by the agent coding addiction. It feels good, we barely sleep, we build amazing things. Every once in a while, that interaction involves other humans, and all of a sudden, we get a reality check that maybe we overdid it. The most obvious example of this is the massive degradation of quality of issue reports and pull requests. As a maintainer, many PRs now look like an insult to one's time, but when one pushes back, the other person does not see what they did wrong. They thought they helped and contributed and got agitated when you close it down. But it's way worse than that. I see people develop parasocial relationships with their AIs, get heavily addicted to it, and create communities where people reinforce highly unhealthy behavior. How did we get here and what does it do to us? End quote. We are all trying to grapple with what is perhaps the most dramatic change the software world has ever undergone. In this post, Armin grapples with it right out there in public. I appreciate him for doing that. He's been a thought leader for many years and it's comforting to know that even folks like him are struggling to see this new world clearly. ([Time 0:00:36](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4dbf24c8-a9a6-41d7-badc-27a26da77b9f)) - **Maintainers Hit By Low-Quality PRs** - Maintainers report PRs and issue reports that feel like an insult to their time. - Contributors often think they helped and get agitated when maintainers close or reject those submissions. Transcript: Jerod Santo The most obvious example of this is the massive degradation of quality of issue reports and pull requests. As a maintainer, many PRs now look like an insult to one's time, but when one pushes back, the other person does not see what they did wrong. They thought they helped and contributed and got agitated when you close it down. ([Time 0:00:53](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1c8f8de0-e442-459f-8db4-354ad6f7c0c9)) - **Treat Social Apps Like File Systems** - Dan Abramov invites readers to view social apps through the file paradigm to improve portability and interoperability. - He suggests the AT Protocol exemplifies a 'social file system' that enables app-agnostic social data. Transcript: Jerod Santo And it's comforting to know that even folks like him are struggling to see this new world clearly. A social file system. Dan Abramov starts this excellent article by praising the portability and effectiveness of the files paradigm. Quote, apps and formats are manufactured End quote. To many. File formats let different apps work together without knowing about each other. End quote. Then Dan goes on to describe how the files paradigm could apply to social apps like Instagram, Reddit, Tumblr, GitHub, and TikTok. But this is no hypothetical. It's literally how the at protocol works, which Dan calls a social file system. Quote, I've previously written about the at protocol in OpenSocial, looking at its model from a web-centric perspective. But I think that looking at it from the file system perspective is just as intriguing. So I invite you to take a tour of how it works. ([Time 0:01:39](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e347148b-ac53-4a88-8167-8676eff41818)) - **Prototype Cross-Platform Features With Agents** - Use small, focused projects or agents to port ideas like Repo Bar to other platforms quickly. - Jerod notes agents could fork or extend features, enabling rapid cross-platform prototyping. Transcript: Jerod Santo Repo Bar puts GitHub at a glance from your menu bar. Repo Bar keeps your GitHub work in view without opening the browser. Pin the repos you care about and get a clear glanceable dashboard of CI releases, traffic, and activity right from the macOS menu bar. Repo Bar works with GitHub Enterprise, but it doesn't work with Linux or Windows. No big deal. Fire up an agent and you could have this idea ported to your OS of choice in a few hours, tops. Or have it fork and add multi-platform support. ([Time 0:02:32](https://share.snipd.com/snip/00754e83-384c-43de-a484-6314b5c32edd)) - **Guard Against Stale Dependency Suggestions** - Recognize that coding agents may suggest insecure dependencies from stale training data. - Integrate live component intelligence (e.g., Sonatype Guide) into AI-assisted workflows to avoid vulnerable versions. Transcript: Jerod Santo Your agent's dependency choices are a liability. Coding agents are good, but they don't know when a dependency is compromised. That's a liability teams want to avoid, but how? Agents are great at writing code that works, but they're pulling dependency recommendations from training data that's stale and outdated. That package version Copilot just suggested might have a known vulnerability that was disclosed six months after the model's knowledge cutoff. Your code compiles, but your security posture does not. That's why teams are choosing Sonotype Guide to select the best open source components from the start and maintain the safest dependency versions. Sonotype Guide is an MCP server that integrates directly with your AI coding assistant. So when you're generating code, the dependency recommendations come from Sonotype's live component intelligence, not frozen training data. They've been the trusted resource behind Maven Central for over 15 million developers. Now that same component knowledge can feed directly into your AI workflow. You can use Sonotype Guide with Clog, Cursor, and other assistance that support MCP. Explore the product ([Time 0:03:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7aa9e13e-6478-4f9f-a545-c4aade21e0cc)) - **Practical Postgres Patterns That Improve Lifecycles** - Ethan McCue lists Postgres patterns that change day-to-day operations and collaboration. - His recommendations include UUID keys, timestamps, schemas, soft deletes, and representing statuses as logs. Transcript: Jerod Santo Life-altering Postgres patterns. Believe it or not, Ethan McHugh does not think that title is clickbait. He's found the set of things shared in his linked post so valuable that they have indeed altered he and his co-workers' lives for the better. Here is the list. Use UUID primary keys. Give everything created at and updated at. On update restrict, on delete restrict. Use schemas. Enum tables. Name your tables singularly. Mechanically named join tables. Almost always soft delete. Represent statuses as a log. Mark special rows with a system ID. Use views sparingly and JSON queries. I agree with most of these, but plural table names for the win. ([Time 0:04:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/962cbf57-09e1-4c0a-95e7-01b077a0c0f6)) - **Web Dependency Management Needs A Fix** - Lea Verou argues the web's dependency model is broken because browsers delegate dependency management to external tooling. - She calls for standards and browser-level fixes to make dependencies first-class and cheaper to use. Transcript: Jerod Santo Web dependencies are broken. Can we fix them? Leah Verrou says, quote, Dear JS ecosystem, I love you, but you have a dependency management problem when it comes to the web and the time has come for an intervention. End quote. The topic of that intervention, we all know what it is. Quote, in healthy ecosystems, dependencies are normal, cheap, and first class. Dependency-free is not a badge of honor. And yet the web platform has outsourced this fundamental functionality to third-party tooling. As a result, code reuse has become a balancing of trade-offs that should not have existed in the first place. End quote. She doesn't think incremental improvements can get us out of this mess that we're in, suggesting one radical solution that she isn't entirely sure will work. In the end, this post is a call to action for the community. Quote, to browser vendors, to standard groups, to individual developers, let's fix this. ([Time 0:04:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/236fb9f6-a6b3-4c95-b478-63dd0c9d9c3b)) - **Heads-Up On Other Notable Stories** - Jerod lists additional headlines like Cloudflare acquiring Astro and debates on 'Dead Internet Theory.' - He ends by encouraging listeners to subscribe to the ChangeLog newsletter for deeper links and context. Transcript: Jerod Santo Cloudflare acquires Astro. Dead Internet Theory, again, and why senior engineers let bad projects fail. Get in on the newsletter at changelog.news. Have yourself a great week. 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