alt Hacker News> "Why say honest? We're talking to our coworkers. We would always be honest."
I grew up in the US South where starting or ending a sentence with "honest/honestly" was very common.
Because of behavioral / cultural norms, you might be very openly friendly with big smiles around a business customer that really grates on your nerves, or very openly nice to a neighbor that you really wish would move away and take their 3am welding and grinding in their garage with them.
Saying "honest/honestly" was seen as a "inside baseball" situation, where you were dropping social pretenses to tell someone your true opinion on a person or situation or whatever.
This also gets used inside companies between senior staff / management / directors / etc, as: "Okay, company politics and nonsense aside, I am being vulnerable here for a second and telling you what I really think about a $thing at potentially great job/advancement risk to myself".
Can it be meaningless? Yes.
Can the person say "honestly" and lie? Yes.
It has uses.
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If I’m having a convo with someone and they drop in “honestly” I immediately discount everything else they’ve said, and what follows.
Sometimes people use it reflexively and doesn’t carry the same meaning (for me).
There's a difference between how you describe using "honestly" and how claude seems to prefer tokens like "honest" and "load-bearing." An example from some coworkers attempting to replace product managers with Claude.
> Deliberately avoid a heavyweight "alert governance" process; the lightest recurring check that keeps FP-rate honest is the right dose.
And one for load bearing:
> Five open questions still stand; the load-bearing two are the runbook-AC contradiction (ratify "high-priority set only") and pinning the "high-priority set" definition + SLO source-of-truth before Milestone 3 (small-sample noise on a low-traffic fleet).
I recall having a conversation with someone many moons ago. They asked me a very weighty and significant question, and I answered it. Then they asked me to "promise". This was really thought-provoking for me.
To this day, it's the only part I remember. I told them I would not promise, as everything I said was true. Making a specific promise would create an implication that I'm generally untruthful, unless I "promise".