You and I have a baseline. A brain that did most of it’s developmental phase while there was still some unified accepted version of truth (even if dubious)
Future generations will have to develop in a more splintered reality. A world where there is nothing to hold on to. Not even a dubious commonly accepted narrative
I will admit that GG may have been a symptom, but I don't think it was the cause. The cause, as such, was the interblag and incorporation of advertising corrupting touch into everything.
It may have been when you noticed it but it wasn’t the spark.
If there was an actual spark, it was the 2016 election as this was the first time when all the disinformation, professional troll farms and Russian influence truly came into play on a world changing scale.
But there was splintering of online communities and the death of nuance for years prior as well. Twitter contributed a lot by giving voices to everyone, and promoting those who’d shout the loudest. Facebook and its nasty algorithm also greatly contributed to all this (thanks, everyone who worked there, for the world we have now… hope you’re proud and putting all that ad-sponsored salary to good use).
Culture war was brewing long before, it just got amplified more and more.
> If there was an actual spark, it was the 2016 election as this was the first time when all the disinformation, professional troll farms and Russian influence truly came into play on a world changing scale.
I'll never forget how insane HN went in 2016, felt like basically the whole English language internet went insane. And it's been a decade since then (wow).
Even back then it seemed like a tempest in a teapot situation on HN. People thought they were raw and edgy saying “fuck Trump” like it amounts to anything. I remember at least one, maybe two YC-backed companies dedicated to removing Trump. That’s right - a startup business plan that amounts to impeaching a president. Now there’s a billion+ dollar enterprise.
All this, and here we are in 2026. It just shows immaturity and naïveté.
> Here’s the thing: most of our habits at work still assume that producing something means you have to understand it.
This has only ever been true in a relative sense. Until recently, one was expected to understand the software-level code they wrote. But not the machine code, or the computer internals at a deep level. You trust that those layers work. At some point in the past you couldn’t just trust that. At some point in the near future, you will just trust that the software code works. Instead you’ll just debate the spec (the prompt). Your thinking can move one level up the system hierarchy. Everyone’s can. We’ve done it before, we’ll do it again, and this won’t even be the last time it happens. Let go of the anxiety and let it happen.
You trust machine code because it was produced by a deterministic system that was written and tested thoroughly by other engineers.
AI systems are not the same. You can't guarantee deterministic output.
Also, code is still the best language we have to convey our intentions as engineers into function. Natural language is too imprecise and ambiguous.
Understanding the code allows us to understand the intention behind the code and identify bugs, plan and architect better. Inspecting prompts gives you a blinkered view of the system meaning you're more likely to make incorrect assumptions leading to serious bugs.
Right, it's a chain of trust between the layers. The link I choose next to me helps determine the quality of successive links, whether I inspect them or not.
When I buy a wooden shack from a carpenter, I'd never expect them to core-sample every plank to ensure it's good wood. That's because a good carpenter habitually buys wood from a good supplier, and will have the experience to detect other suspicious indicators.
Similarly, my coworker might not have verified the machine code, but I can be pretty confident they didn't vibe-install a compiler by Ken Thompson that puts backdoors into the binary.
But in chemical science you would not "understand" everything. You cook with ingredients where you don't fully understand then.
There are always limits.
Engineering human types are often guilty of saying something is low cost but then not doing it themselves. Great, "understand everything".
Trust us trust. You trust an entity. What the author is describing is a new kind of transaction. It's not that AI causes people to lie suddenly (although if you trusted the wrong people this might happen to you, but YOU were wrong then) but now you have a lot of work being done more at the edge of uncertainty and recommendations. Ideas are not ideas anymore, they are working implementations.
So instead of submitting discussions or requests for features, you literally submit implemented features because the cost is lower. This is good. You just have to realize that you are starting the discussion with a working implementation. If you continually try to act like this is not the case, without someone literally lying to you about it, this is more about just accepting a now workflow.
In a sense yes. I trust that my coworkers will be accountable for their outcomes and accomplish them with the high quality bar I know they intrinsically hold themselves to. And that they understand our shared goals and if they don't, they will work to become aligned.
And if I can't say that for a coworker, well, that's performance feedback.
Your coworkers are if anything less reliably deterministic than an AI. And the human version of a prompt injection is called social engineering and it’s far more of an issue than actual prompt injection and has been for an extremely long time.
Unlike AI, those layers were traditionally compiled using deterministic tools. And generally came with a suite of other tools to trace and debug them. I don't trust AI in the same way at all.
>This has only ever been true in a relative sense. Until recently, one was expected to understand the software-level code they wrote. But not the machine code, or the computer internals at a deep level.
Just because something wasn't required at all levels or 100% it doesn't mean it wasn't required or it wasn't important though.
I trusted that the machine code worked because it was a mostly mechanical transformation, with little to zero non-determinism involved, and the design decisions for the high level code were still mine and understood. Not the same with an LLM, even when see just as an added level of abstraction.
Given some LLM produced code, I also trust the compiler will produce working machine code matching it. Doesn't mean I trust the LLM code in the same way.
Mostly agreed. In a previous life, I used to write code, then got Peter Principled upwards to the point where I "trusted" the engineers under me to do their job. Did I understand all the code my team wrote? Of course not. Even if I wanted to review all the code written by 20+ developers to the point where I could stay I understood it, there simply wasn't enough hours in the day to do so.
I figure what is happening is (human) software engineering as a discipline, at least on large scale projects, is rapidly and irreversibly mutating to software project management. But instead of managing teams of people, you're managing teams of agents. Where I disagree with your comment is in the assertion that everyone "can move one level up the system hierarchy." Some folks can't, so they'll stagnate. Welcome to the Peter Principle World.
> Even if I wanted to review all the code written by 20+ developers to the point where I could stay I understood it, there simply wasn't enough hours in the day to do so.
The difference of course being that you had 20+ developers who did understand it. With AI generated code no one has that understanding. The AI sure doesn't
> Some folks can't, so they'll stagnate.
And we have no answer for those people. Just "fuck you the world changed and you're being left behind"? Where exactly does that lead?
I'd argue the trust was always relative. Witness what happens when you are hired to untangle the buggy mess that was left by the previous "senior" engineer. Sure there was trust when they were in charge, but based on the code they wrote, they didn't actually understand anything they were doing.
I don't think that's the problem the source article is describing. I've seen a number of instances now where people produce work product they don't understand at any level. "Hey Claude, design this feature and send it out for review, thx!" will often seem to work if you don't know any better.
I wonder when the people will get that intelligence is not only directed at the external, but only really starts when you look at the internal (joy, pleasure, traumas, taboos, awkwardness, abuse, trust etc.). Look up the word "interoception".
I think one way to approach this is by deliberately choosing less capable tools (but still AI-assisted). You don't have to delegate huge tasks to agents wholesale, but it requires fighting against mainstream harnesses to do so because they exist to sell you more tokens. Model providers are not incentivised to offer less autonomous flows.
I wrote about this frustration a few months ago [1], then realised that if the model providers won't do it perhaps I should try fixing it myself. So, shameless plug klaxon, I wrote an open-source harness that tries to work more like pair programming and less like code review [2].
As usual, my "Show HN" post [3] sank like a stone, so I think perhaps most engineers aren't really interested in this direction. It is possible though, we don't have to just accept whatever tooling the labs throw at us.
No one made people like Sam Altman into a compulsive liar. No one made Musk call a service full self driving, and then make it return liability to the user the second it decides an accident is about to happen.
Stop removing agency from the people making the top level decisions and reaping all the rewards.
Would you claim that someone who took 5 shots in a row and drove home wasn’t responsible for an accident because the car was what physically did the damage?
Yeah, I think what they really mean is people, especially those with power, broke this thing called trust and now they're trying to use """ai""" as a scapegoat.
It'd be along the same lines as saying "I was drunk driving 75km/hr over the limit down a busy suburban road during the middle of the day and 5 people died because of it so we CAN NOT TRUST CARS"
Every generation has had tech doomers. Every single one. History repeats. Yet we collectively move forward. This time it will be no different. These folks are wasting time when they could be doing something productive.
plenty of ex-civs had techdoomers who were right. When tevh doomers have no salient points to make, its fair to not listen, but this time around i think something is different to historic doomerism.
Trust is a fundamental thing, and i cannot fathom how a post-trust society could possibly host life as we know it. Life ad we know it comes from systemic efficiencies that are rooted in trust, requiring it deeply. no trust means extreme loss in system efficiency, in a system already creaking under the straign of supporting current populations.
post trust is in my reakoning a serious issue to engage with.
There are plenty of low-trust societies. They have things like armed security guards and barbed wire fences outside every apartment complex. Coughsouthafrica
right, but that surive in isolation, heard immunity to collapse so to speak, but globe wide? pandemonium. we're back to fiefdoms and warring city-states in a generation.
You and I have a baseline. A brain that did most of it’s developmental phase while there was still some unified accepted version of truth (even if dubious)
Future generations will have to develop in a more splintered reality. A world where there is nothing to hold on to. Not even a dubious commonly accepted narrative
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