The first rule of Dunning-Kruger Club is you don't know you're in it

The first rule of Dunning-Kruger Club.... is you don't know you're in Dunning-Kruger Club.

The AI-driven uptick in the hubris of "we don't need no stinkin’ experts anymore" has me thinking about the Dunning-Kruger effect a lot lately.

For those unfamiliar, this refers to a psychological study (by Dunning and… Kruger) where they measured people’s confidence in a skill or understanding of a topic. What they found was that when people have very little experience in a topic / skill, they tend to oversimplify it and feel overly confident in their knowledge / ability.

When someone moves beyond naivety through study or practice, their confidence bottoms out as they realize it’s not as simple as they once assumed. This is the point where many people give up. 👀 For those that continue on, mastery brings back confidence but with understanding of the nuances and known unknowns that the amateur lacks.

This meme references the starting point- ignorant hubris. Anyone can err on the side of oversimplification, it’s more a matter of how far we’re willing to take our naive assumptions. We have already watched people start their vibe-coding journey with high confidence, only to have confidence plunge as their creation devolves into a tangle of spaghetti code beyond untangling by them or the LLM (or full of risks they don't have the savvy to detect, not able to scale, etc).

Those of us who’ve experienced codebases built on the “throw bodies at it” school of software development saw this coming. Sure, you *can* slap together business logic as demanded without proper planning or architecture. Good luck debugging and enhancing it, though. Vibe coders are learning the same lesson as many non-developer founders who threw money at a team of bargain-basement developers to build their dream software.

I suspect we’ll see a lot of Dunning-Kruger across roles that AI has supposedly reached mastery of in the coming years. And frankly, I’m here for it.

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🎩 tip to anyone who picked up on the cigarette burn homage