The oral tradition that built software may not survive AI
TL;DR
For decades, software engineering has relied on something surprisingly fragile: veteran developers passing down institutional knowledge from person to person. As AI transforms how code gets written and maintained, that culture of inherited memory may be starting to break apart.
Nauti's Take
Instructive: the piece points to a real opportunity, since teams that make their developers' tacit knowledge visible now gain resilience, with or without AI. The catch: if AI displaces mentoring between seniors and juniors, hard-to-document institutional know-how risks vanishing.
Nauti's view: use AI, but deliberately protect spaces for human-to-human knowledge transfer.
Sources