Intel / article

Quoting Armin Ronacher

Source: Simon Willison
Author: Simon Willison
Date: Published Jul 14, 2026

Key takeaways · AI-distilled

A project's real shared language is unwritten: what its concepts mean, where boundaries sit, which invariants matter, who owns what, and why the system has the shape it does. It lives in review and argument, not in any one document.
Before agents, changing someone else's storage layer forced you to read their code and ask them questions. That detour was the mechanism by which their understanding became yours.
Not all coordination slowness is waste. Part of it was a running check on whether two people still agreed about how the system worked, which is friction acting as synchronization.

Why it matters

If agents let anyone change any layer without talking to its owners, you need a deliberate replacement for the synchronization that slow code review used to provide.

Key quotes

“The shared language of a software project is not English or Python but it is the common understanding of what its concepts mean, where the boundaries are, which invariants matter, who owns what, and why the system has the shape it does.”
Armin Ronacher

“Before agents, some of this shared understanding was maintained by friction.”
Armin Ronacher

“Some of it was the process by which your understanding became mine, and by which both of us discovered whether we still agreed about how the system worked. This friction synchronizes people.”
Armin Ronacher

Read the source ↗simonwillison.net