Trust-Building Technology

Vision Coding in Practice, Part Three

When I first heard web3 promises about “trustless” systems – replacing all social contracts with smart contracts – I rejected the plan. Not because it isn’t technically clever, or because the technology doesn’t solve real problems, but because of the dangerous promise: that we’d stop needing to try to trust one another. That felt like giving up on essential parts of community and society.

Now, I wonder: Can we imagine trust-building technology instead? What kind of technology would help us come to trust the builder-stewards, contributors, and other stakeholders over time? In a world where AI is inserting itself everywhere, building trust between people feels more critical than ever.

Trust is a key driver of our quality of life. It’s also more efficient! When people trust one another – e.g. to look out for you, pay favors forward, and make amends – things can flow in a community without elaborate contracts or fear of cheating. As Bob Putnam famously quipped, “A society that relies on generalized reciprocity is more efficient than a distrustful one.”

In the context of vision coding and AI-assisted building, I see two big opportunities to build tech for a trustful world: the careful builder’s mindset and trust-building by co-design.

Careful Builders: Software as Craft and Community Service

When people take great care in designing, building, deploying, maintaining, and improving community-scale software, things tend to go well. Reliable, local software stewarded by reliable people.

Do you know the people who make the software you rely on? What would it be like if you did? And if you do know them, do they have the power to improve the software in ways that matter to you?

And as local, craft builders, we don’t have to go it alone! We can make our tools inspectable by other people who care, too. We can test with people who have stake in the system’s success. Elders in our extended community with experience and skills can offer risk mitigation strategies. We can seek consults from peers before going live.

This is software work as care work and craft, with apprenticeships and craft guilds.

Trust-Building by Co-Design

The creation process and the technology itself could facilitate trust-building within a community. When people co-design tools, rituals, or systems for their own community:

• People are invited to play a role that matters

• They see their fingerprints in what emerges

• Neighbors see them contributing, shifting perception from stranger to co-creator

• The process signals mutual respect and agency

• We get new opportunities to show up for one another

And the technology itself can facilitate trust-building between people who are in relationship with one another. This spans lots of use cases. The tools we build can facilitate:

• Visible acts of care and humanity witnessed by others

• Stories of care and connection shared back and shaping our narratives

• Everyday prosocial interaction that builds trust across difference

Openings for Repair and Governance

Communities must be able to hold messiness, conflict, and rupture – not just prevent it. Applying this to software, that means designing for care commitments that don't stop at matching needs and offers through a tool, but extend into repair work when things go wrong. It means practicing right relationship – where accountability is relational, not punitive. And it means creating space for reparative justice as a shared approach and responsibility.

When communities co-design governance, not just features, we can co-create rules, roles, and responses to challenges. We give each other the gift of clarity about how feedback turns into change. And we make the system feel alive and communal. We’ll dive deeper into repair work and collective governance in future posts.

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Trust grows when people are invited into the making, feel safe showing up, and we prioritize relationships.

We can imagine a trustful world scaffolded by trust-building tech.