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Havoc 20 hours ago [-]
I worry for the next 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
marssaxman 1 hours ago [-]
The experience you envision does not sound so strange to me, having grown up in an intensely religious subculture which had a sense of truth quite distinct from that of mainstream society. Observing the blatant conflict between different communities' world-views engendered a healthy skepticism which has served me well through life. I think the kids will be all right.
OroPla 2 hours ago [-]
I am not sure I believe in this "unified accepted version of the truth". Before the Internet it was a lot easier for the unified media [1] to convince people of whatever it wanted them convinced, but I find it a lot better for people to be exposed to opposing views. Who knows, maybe your country is the bad guy [2].
note this started years before generative AI, arguably around 2014 with the gamergate era
Havoc 3 hours ago [-]
Agreed. Truthiness started to wobble earlier, but I think it's fair to say it still existed. New era will shatter it into a thousand pieces
nonsensical_ 16 hours ago [-]
You’ll have to enlighten how GG plays into all this. Sounds like a curious tie-in.
mitxela 16 hours ago [-]
It was the spark that started the online culture war that metastasized into the real world and brought about the post-truth era we are now living in.
Who knows whether it was a symptom or a cause. Either way it marks the beginning.
anon1097 8 hours ago [-]
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.
scrollaway 8 hours ago [-]
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.
mitxela 6 hours ago [-]
The 2016 election, you may remember, came after and was partially caused by Gamergate.
disgruntledphd2 7 hours ago [-]
> 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).
nonsensical_ 6 hours ago [-]
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.
daveguy 4 hours ago [-]
But also, fuck trump.
elmer2 8 hours ago [-]
It was around in 2008. Reddit was flooded with bots shilling for Obama.
hackersnooze1 8 hours ago [-]
are you the same guy who made the fluid simulation thing and the little volumetric display on youtube?
salawat 15 hours ago [-]
Earlier. I'd say it started right around the time SEO started taking off big time.
monegator 1 hours ago [-]
we still have books. Hard truth. Hoard books.
plaidfuji 24 hours ago [-]
> 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.
meander_water 23 hours ago [-]
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.
Terr_ 22 hours ago [-]
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.
theoreticalmal 6 hours ago [-]
What about a team of human coders is more deterministic than an AI coder?
nobodywillobsrv 14 hours ago [-]
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.
faangguyindia 20 hours ago [-]
Are your teammates deterministic output machines?
atomicnumber3 20 hours ago [-]
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.
scrollaway 8 hours ago [-]
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.
atomicnumber3 4 hours ago [-]
I don't know what to say except that this has not been the case for me. Claude is a different person for every single prompt and has absolutely no core sense of what our goals are, or even who the "our" is that's having goals.
While my coworkers are very stable personalities of a consistent work drive, sense of pragmatism, things that they find more and less interesting, career aspirations, etc. they're not all the exact same, and I depend on that as I fit tasks and ownership to people.
faangguyindia 20 hours ago [-]
Highly likely, your trust is just based on your feelings, and they don't do much for the product quality.
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.
coldtea 23 hours ago [-]
>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.
glouwbug 21 hours ago [-]
Then put your money where the mouth is and start committing prompts and having your LLM “compile” them with each production release.
dc396 12 hours ago [-]
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.
bluefirebrand 8 hours ago [-]
> 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?
optimiz3 23 hours ago [-]
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.
vrighter 10 hours ago [-]
because we could trust the layer below. Now we can't
SpicyLemonZest 19 hours ago [-]
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.
sigalor 1 days ago [-]
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".
22 hours ago [-]
philbo 18 hours ago [-]
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?
mitxela 17 hours ago [-]
There were always a spectrum of people to choose from to become elites. We chose a system that chose the ones who compulsively lied.
asdff 16 hours ago [-]
To be fair, it has probably only been that way forever. At least we live in a time where some people might realize it.
rcxdude 12 hours ago [-]
That choice was also made within a framework of another system. It's systems all the way down.
georgemcbay 24 hours ago [-]
> AI Is Breaking This Thing We Call Trust
An increasingly large percentage of people being lying POS grifters is breaking trust.
AI just happens to be a tool that the laziest of that group of people leans on a lot to supercharge their grifts.
But our massive and growing trust problem predates and is way deeper than AI.
imawakegnxoxo 21 hours ago [-]
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"
And everyone stands up and claps
Art9681 19 hours ago [-]
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.
Grimblewald 18 hours ago [-]
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.
mitxela 17 hours ago [-]
There are plenty of low-trust societies. They have things like armed security guards and barbed wire fences outside every apartment complex. Coughsouthafrica
Grimblewald 9 hours ago [-]
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.
mock-possum 6 hours ago [-]
Isn’t “low trust society” just the latest racist dog whistle though? When you say ‘low-trust society’ don’t you just mean the third world, populated by brown people? Or are there examples of first world white low trust societies?
bluefirebrand 8 hours ago [-]
> There are plenty of low-trust societies
And high trust societies have spent the past two decades importing tons of H1B style workers from many of the lower trust countries
mitxela 6 hours ago [-]
Which ones are those? Sweden?
bluefirebrand 5 hours ago [-]
Be snotty about it if you want but I didn't invent the term "low trust society", it's a pretty accepted term in social psychology from what I can tell
And based on that, countries like India, Pakistan, Phillipines, Nigeria, Syria all quality as "low to very low trust", and they also represent some of the highest numbers of immigration to many countries right now. A full 30% of immigrants to Canada over the past 5 years are from India, for example.
I don't think it is that unreasonable of me to suggest that people from low trust societies bring low trust behavior with them.
Which does not imply they are untrustworthy people by the way. It does imply a different set of expectations and public behaviors though, which often chafe with their new country
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
[1] https://pomf.space/MkiGm3hi.mp4
[2] https://youtu.be/3K1Z-8EvS74
Who knows whether it was a symptom or a cause. Either way it marks the beginning.
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.
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).
All this, and here we are in 2026. It just shows immaturity and naïveté.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And if I can't say that for a coworker, well, that's performance feedback.
While my coworkers are very stable personalities of a consistent work drive, sense of pragmatism, things that they find more and less interesting, career aspirations, etc. they're not all the exact same, and I depend on that as I fit tasks and ownership to people.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
[1]: https://philbooth.me/blog/agentic-coding-and-mental-models
[2]: https://www.opairdev.org/
[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49625009
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?
An increasingly large percentage of people being lying POS grifters is breaking trust.
AI just happens to be a tool that the laziest of that group of people leans on a lot to supercharge their grifts.
But our massive and growing trust problem predates and is way deeper than AI.
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"
And everyone stands up and claps
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.
And high trust societies have spent the past two decades importing tons of H1B style workers from many of the lower trust countries
And based on that, countries like India, Pakistan, Phillipines, Nigeria, Syria all quality as "low to very low trust", and they also represent some of the highest numbers of immigration to many countries right now. A full 30% of immigrants to Canada over the past 5 years are from India, for example.
I don't think it is that unreasonable of me to suggest that people from low trust societies bring low trust behavior with them.
Which does not imply they are untrustworthy people by the way. It does imply a different set of expectations and public behaviors though, which often chafe with their new country