Developers trust tools that encode trust
Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust
Developers stick with tools like Vim and Emacs because they encode trust through familiarity and predictability. As AI coding agents gain adoption, trust drops—usage rose from 76% to 84%, but trust fell from 40% to 29%. The article explores how new tools disrupt established processes, why AI's opacity and unpredictability hinder trust, and how organizations can rebuild trust by keeping humans accountable and capturing tacit knowledge.
If you leave anything up to chance, it will be left up to chance.
- firasd
I feel like these abstractions like "CI might not work well in the era of agentic tooling" are fine for thought-leadership posts but there's so much hands-on work to be done. The last word on AI computer use shouldn't be bash utils that were already feature-complete before MJ recorded Thriller.
There is some movement in this direction--there is a new 'gh' subcommand called repo read-file for example, that lets agents view a file without cloning a repo. And I made something called venetianblinds that shows equidistant samples of a file. In combo they work pretty well:
gh repo read-file sqlite3.c --repo clibs/sqlite --output sqlite3.
c && npx github:firasd/venetianblinds sqlite3.c
--- sample 2/20 char 283427 line 5855 col 53 range 283367:283487
le].
**
** ^Closing a BLOB shall cause the current transaction to commit
** if there are no other BLOBs, no pending prep
^
- utopiah
Im typing this in GVim thanks to Tridactyl using my new mechanical keyboard running a ZMK firmware I just built via Github actions (or directly via ZMK Studio).
This is ridiculously complex to just type a few paragraphs. Nobody in their right mind would invest this amount of yak shaving... and yet I do so because I get, rather confidently, that in few years, heck few decades, all those tools will be different (or maybe not, I still use Vim on my server, desktop but even mobile phone) but the lessons will remain practical.
IMHO the trust comes from trust yes but also more directly plain ownership.