this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2026
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There is a fundamental difference this post is pretending doesn't exist.
Trusting the abstractions of compilers and fundamental widely used libraries is not a problem because they are deterministic and battle tested.
LLMs do not add a layer of abstraction. They produce code at the existing layer of abstraction.
they're also not equivalent because LLMs pretense is to remove the human from the equation, essentially saying that we don't need that knowledge anymore. But people still do have that knowledge. Those telephone systems still work because someone knows how each part works. That will never be true for an LLM.
I'm more than confident that - if you actually went down to AT&T HQ and really dug into the weeds - you'd find blind spots in the network created by people leaving the company and failing to back-fill their expertise. Or people who incorrectly documented this or that, forcing their coworkers to rediscover the error the hard way.
I think we do underestimate how many systems are patched over, lost in the weeds, or fully reinvented (by accident or as a necessary replacement) because somebody in the chain of knowledge was never retained or properly replaced.
I would be very dubious of the theory that anyone at AT&T could recreate their system network from the 1980s, without relying on all the modernizations and digitized efficiencies, for instance. No way in hell they could reproduce the system from the 1940s, because all that old hardware (nevermind the personal) has been rendered obsolete ages ago. But I'm sure there are still lines in the ground that were laid decades ago that are still in use. Possibly lines that they've totally lost track of and simply know exist because the system hasn't failed yet.
But that's the strength of society to begin with, no one person knows how any given complex system works because its impossible for one person to know, we come together in specialised groups to create these systems over time with the collective knoweldge of many people.
Idk if I'd call it a "strength". Feels more like a weakness.
But sure. This is the reason bureaucracies exist. Knowledge accrual, organization of specialties, long term investment planning, and distribution of surplus... as critical today as it was 8,000 years ago.
I mean the alternative is to be like octopi, intelligent but forever stuck in the beginning of the stone age due to a lack of ability to aggregate and accumulate knoweldge over time.
Stupid cephalopods. Learn to breed without dying, idiots!
Agree that it weakens certain things, but I don't see how we can overcome that. It's great to have a knowledgeable GP as your doctor, but their breadth of knowledge causes them to fail at a deep knowledge of specific disease states. So he might be able to determine you have cancer, which then causes him to send you to an oncologist who specializes in that area.
Basically, there is a limit to the volume of information a human can hold. This was partially what AI advertised it could help overcome, but it's so much worse than expected. If we could somehow increase the volume of information a human could hold and process, you'd be in much better shape for those doctor visits that end in "well, I guess this symptom is just you getting older" when really it's SOMETHING but the doctor completely lacks the knowledge of that area.
You would be largely correct. Though I was kind of amused with the "Does anyone know how their telephone works?" ca.1994 and then listed a bunch of things that I very much know. So maybe a bad example.
Well, like with the Netflix question, you can keep going deeper until you hit the unknown. At some point, the person asking the question doesn't know the questions to ask to get to that next level, though.