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+---
+meta:
+  title:  An AI-generated blindfold
+  description: Increasingly, I'm finding it hard to hard to get a sense of human consensus on a topic from the internet 
+  dateCreated: 2026-08-27
+
+tags: 
+  - "software_engineering"
+  - "ai"
+---
+
+Let's say I've got whatever question, usually about AI; here are real examples of questions I've had
+
+- How are people testing their coding agent prompts? 
+- Is there a tool similar to [claude-dev-tools](https://claude-dev.tools/) but for OpenCode? 
+
+Well, I have three main ways of getting an answer: 
+
+- I can ask AI
+- I can google it
+- I can go onto a web forum and ask. 
+
+I'm finding that for each of these approaches - chances are, I'm getting an AI generated response. 
+
+- Asking AI - is explicitly an AI response
+- Googling - I'm going to be seeing the best SEO answers - the SEO being driven by AI
+- Going on a web forum and asking - increasingly seems to be AI bots. 
+
+This makes it hard to assess whether people are actually getting value form that answer - or if it's just the convincing expert opinion of an AI. 
+
+Similarly - I can find various tools online, but again it's hard to assess whether anyone is getting value from them, or if it is a vibe coded side project with no real battle testing. 
+
+## It's less of a problem for regular pre-AI software engineering concepts
+
+Recently I've been doing more with telemetry and observability. 
+
+I use chat-based AI for this and generally I trust the answer I'm getting. 
+
+## It's more a problem for new fields - such as AI itself
+
+AI is a fast moving field - so it's fair to say 'of course you can't get a clear picture of what the consensus is - there _is_ no consensus'. 
+
+It's a bit like bad old days of JavaScript web frameworks, where every three months or so it felt like there was a new framework, and if you backed the wrong horse you were stuck with a tool that the industry left behind. Like that, but on steroids. 
+
+And there has always been a bit of a problem of cargo cult programming - people adopting a technology without really knowing what problem it is solving. 
+
+But at least back then there were a handful or tools, and they were industry wide. 
+
+Now, the problem is:
+
+**ease of vibe coding a tool + lack of human connection = the same problem being solved repeatedly by ten thousand different people**
+
+The AI companies probably love this - rather than having one team use AI to vibe code the tool and the rest of the world use it - have one thousand teams each use AI to vibe the cool and each be using AI to maintain said tool. 
+
+## The solution 
+
+I think in-person meetups are more important than ever. 
+
+Presenting at a meetup 'hey look at this tool I vibe coded, here's how I did it' I think is valuable signal, it gives us a grounded picture of what's actually happening in a fast moving industry. 
+
+