The Machine Nods Along
There’s a comfort in being agreed with. Even professionally.
You know the type of meeting. You make a point, and people nod along with you. Someone says you made a good point.
No pushback. No nuance. No friction. Just validation, served warm with sugar.
It feels great. Eventually, it should worry and concern you.
Agreement Is Insufficient
In software development, agreement is one of the cheapest things you can offer.
I’ve worked with plenty of people who agree with everything you say. You can say anything in a meeting, people do not listen and simply agree with you and then do something entirely different.
They nod in meetings. They approve pull requests. They tell you your idea is “solid” and “makes sense”.
So when the system falls over a few short weeks later, it’s counterintuitive that everyone is surprised. Agreement didn’t help, and it actually contributed to the collapse of a working system. Because of course it did.
The Politeness Trap
Nodding along doesn’t usually help. Just agreeing with a bad idea is a bad idea (but you knew that already).
What really helps everyone in the team is anyone with a critical mindset is in the room. You know the kind of thing that is said, that actually helps people out in the room..
“I don’t think that scales.”
“This breaks an edge case.”
“Have you thought about what happens when this fails at 3 a.m.?”
Agreement feels productive. Disagreement actually is. That’s where the real work takes place, and where the beginning finishes.
Modern AI systems are extremely polite.
They hedge.
They soften language.
They validate your assumptions before carefully rephrasing them back to you.
They think you’re awesome and tend to agree with you no matter how insane (and asinine) the things you’re saying are.
This develops an illusion. It doesn’t matter whether what you say is correct, it’s that what you say becomes confirmed.
Yet politeness is not the same thing as rigor.
If you’ve ever watched a junior developer agree with a senior one despite knowing something feels wrong, you already understand the problem. The system optimizes for harmony, not truth.
That’s fine in customer service.
It’s disastrous in engineering.
Yet Developers Should Be Nervous
Software development depends on tension.
Good systems are built by:
conflicting ideas
trade-offs argued so the best conclusion wins
people being willing to sound difficult
People who will take a risk for the team, and for the solution
If every response you get reinforces your existing belief, you don’t improve. You just move faster in the wrong direction.
Speed plus confidence plus unchecked assumptions gives you some rather horrible outcomes. Let’s make this concrete, if you don’t test your idea you’re going to end up with:
security holes
unmaintainable abstractions
codebases nobody understands but everyone is afraid to touch
I’ve seen this play out with humans. Replacing them with something that never pushes back doesn’t magically fix the problem.
The Illusion of Being Right
The most seductive part of constant agreement is how smart it makes you feel.
If every answer confirms your thinking, you start to believe.
your approach is obvious
dissenters are slow
complexity has been solved
That’s when learning stops.
The best engineers I’ve worked with were the ones who argued with me. Not aggressively. Not per formatively. Just enough to make me pause and think, “Wait. Are they … right?”
If nothing ever causes that pause, you’re not thinking deeply anymore. You’re just shipping opinions.
What I Actually Want From AI
I don’t want flattery.
I want:
This assumption is weak
Here’s where this breaks
There’s an alternative you’re ignoring
I want the system to challenge me, not cheer for me. It’s difficult to put in a prompt that will get any LLM to spit out the truth, but if you can do it that will be worthwhile. Yet nobody is doing it because they actually want their ego massaged.
Yet in software the most dangerous sentence isn’t “this won’t work.”
It’s “you’re absolutely right.”
About The Author
Professional Software Developer “The Secret Developer” can be found on Twitter @TheSDeveloper and regularly publishes articles through Medium.com
The Secret Developer agrees with everyone until production goes down, but quite enjoys the blame game so what’s the difference?