Quoting Kyle Kingsbury
- ID
- 41764
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 02 Nov 2026, 12:49 AM
- Fetched
- 02 Nov 2026, 1:37 AM
- Provider
- Simon Willison
- Category
- developer-ai
- Original URL
- https://simonwillison.net/2026/Nov/1/kyle-kingsbury/
- Source URL
- https://simonwillison.net/atom/everything/
Summary
- Score
- 6.5
- Created
- 02 Nov 2026, 1:38 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_codersai_ml_learnerssaas_founders
What happened
In Jepsen's results for ParticleDB 1.1.4, Kyle Kingsbury argues that LLM use "erodes trust in documentation, in software, and in the organizations which produce them," warning that the signals engineers relied on as markers of a mature system "are now easier to counterfeit" and that engineers may start treating any new software project with suspicion. Simon Willison collected the quote and posted it on 1st November 2026.
Why it matters
The concrete claim is that documentation polish and other maturity markers no longer reliably separate maintained software from generated filler — so a polished README or clean docs site is a weaker reason to adopt a dependency than it was. If you pick libraries or evaluate vendors, shift the weight toward artifacts that are expensive to fake: reproducible test results, external verification reports like Jepsen's, or reading the source. If you ship a product, expect buyers to ask for that evidence rather than trusting your docs.
Discussion angle
What trust signal do you actually use now when adopting a new dependency — external test reports, reproducible benchmarks, source reading, or something else — and has LLM-generated docs changed how much weight you give a project's documentation?