Entire Companies Are Under AI Psychosis — And That's a Problem for No-Code

Mitchell Hashimoto knows a thing or two about building things people actually use. So when he tweeted "I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them," people paid attention. 2,069 points on Hacker News.

Amazon is the most damning case study. The company has been tracking "AI token consumption" and pressuring teams to hit usage quotas. The response from workers was immediate: they started making things up. Amazon employees built AI agents whose sole function was to burn tokens and look busy on the dashboard. People on forums have started calling it "tokenmaxxing."

The Fortune survey from April makes the problem structural. Eighty per cent of white-collar workers are refusing AI adoption mandates. Not secretly sabotaging them. Just quietly doing the work manually while leadership stares at dashboards showing adoption climbing. Fortune called it FOBO: Fear of Becoming Obsolete.

So you get a two-tier reality. Upstairs: "our AI transformation is accelerating." Downstairs: people doing spreadsheets by hand and inventing fake prompts so the graph goes up. This is the corporate AI backlash.

No-code has always worked the other way. It starts with someone who needs to build something, and gives them the tools to build it faster. Nobody adopts Bubble or Glide or Bolt.new because there's a quota. They adopt them because they need a working app and they need it this week. The productivity gain is self-evident. You don't need a dashboard to prove it.

When the AI psychosis bubble pops, the reaction won't be careful. CFOs will look at AI line items and cut them across the board. The people who integrated AI sensibly will get caught in the same blast radius. We saw this before in no-code 1.0: companies went all-in on citizen developers, bought expensive licences, then declared no-code a failure. The tools weren't the problem. The rollout model was.

For no-code builders, be the person who can point to a thing that exists because you used the right tools. The dashboard that went live in three days. The internal app that replaced a spreadsheet. When the AI psychosis hangover arrives, the people who can say "I shipped this" will look very different from the people who can only say "we hit our token quota."