Quoting Armin Ronacher
- Source
- simonwillison.net
- Author
- Simon Willison
- Date
Context
Making code changes easier can remove occasions when developers used to synchronize their understanding. In The Tower Keeps Rising, software developer Armin Ronacher argues that reading a colleague's code and discussing a proposed change did more than slow development: it helped people agree on architecture, ownership and constraints.
Agents can let each developer make changes without those conversations. Ronacher's concern is that construction can continue while the team's shared understanding weakens, so an apparently functioning project may conceal a coordination problem. His essay makes an argument about team practice, rather than reporting a measured increase in defects.
- 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.
“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
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