“Just Trust the Agent” Is the Worst Advice in Programming History

Video Description

New Colab episode between https://www.youtube.com/@UC1U09Fb_5oEBo0mutiNYh5w and https://www.youtube.com/@UCfJRkBBiPtKZyZn_3PxWaiQ ! In this episode of Book Overflow, Carter and Nathan meet again with Carl Brown (Internet of Bugs) to discuss Reflections on Trusting Trust, Coding Machines, and all things AI! Join the Book Overflow Discord (Carl is on here as well!) https://discord.gg/ZwS2fqW7ZZ Check out Carl's new substack here: https://internetofbugs.substack.com/ where Carl is going to be doing some low-jargon writing on the intersection between tech (including AI) and Society. Carl's Site with Links to what he's working on: https://internetofbugs.com/ Ted Chiang articles: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-ted-chiang.html https://kottke.org/21/04/ted-chiang-fears-of-technology-are-fears-of-capitalism https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web Brian Merchant's "Blood in the Machine" SubStack https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/ Cory Doctorow's stuff we mentioned: https://pluralistic.net/tag/enshittification/ https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con https://www.versobooks.com/products/3341-enshittification Ilya Sutskever – We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research on the Dwarkesh Patel Podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aR20FWCCjAs Article about adapting to AI in the classroom https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/25/magazine/ai-higher-education-students-teachers.html --- 00:00 Intro 02:37 Welcome to Carl Brown 05:42 Trusting Trust and Coding Machines 12:57 AI Skepticism and the Limits of Scaling 28:04 Vibe Coding and Code Quality 43:02 AI Safety and the Doomer Narrative 1:01:54 Every Decade They Say Programming Is Dead 1:06:19 Disruption Culture and the AI Bubble 1:23:57 Agentic Security and Trust 1:32:42 Final Thoughts --- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5kj6DLCEWR5nHShlSYJI5L Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/book-overflow/id1745257325 X: https://x.com/bookoverflowpod Carter on X: https://x.com/cartermorgan Nathan's rojoroboto newsletter: https://rojoroboto.com/newsletter Nathan's substack Functionally Imperative: https://functionallyimperative.com ---------------- Book Overflow is a podcast for software engineers, by software engineers dedicated to improving our craft by reading the best technical books in the world. Join Carter Morgan and Nathan Toups as they read and discuss a new technical book each week! The full book schedule and links to every major podcast player can be found at https://www.bookoverflow.io