Why the software industry needs a lot of regulation
Software engineers can deploy code that kills hundreds of people without anywhere near that level of accountability. Here’s why I don’t think that’s right, or even sustainable. They say regulations are written in blood, and it wasn’t until the failure of the St Francis Dam killed around 400 people in 1928 that licensing of civil engineers become a requirement in California.
- ▪Software engineers can deploy code that kills hundreds of people without anywhere near that level of accountability.
- ▪Here’s why I don’t think that’s right, or even sustainable.
- ▪They say regulations are written in blood, and it wasn’t until the failure of the St Francis Dam killed around 400 people in 1928 that licensing of civil engineers become a requirement in California.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Pete Warden's blog |
| Canonical URL | https://petewarden.com/2026/09/10/why-the-software-industry-needs-a-lot-of-regulation/ |
| Publication time | Mon, 14 Sep 2026 11:30:19 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-14T11:56:51.134Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-14T11:56:51.134Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | JbojBcs_jbP5 · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Why the software industry needs a lot of regulation September 10, 2026 By Pete Warden in Uncategorized Tags: ai, artificial-intelligence, chatgpt, llm, technology Leave a comment Structural engineers have a physical stamp that they apply to plans they approve, and if a building falls down due to design problems, they’re directly and personally responsible. Software engineers can deploy code that kills hundreds of people without anywhere near that level of accountability. Here’s why I don’t think that’s right, or even sustainable. They say regulations are written in blood, and it wasn’t until the failure of the St Francis Dam killed around 400 people in 1928 that licensing of civil engineers become a requirement in California.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Pete Warden's blog.
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