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Armin Ronacher's 'The Tower Keeps Rising': AI Agents Erode the Coordination Friction That Kept Teams in Sync
In an essay quoted by Simon Willison, Armin Ronacher argues a software project's real shared language is not English or Python but the common understanding of concepts, boundaries, invariants, and ownership — and that pre-AI 'friction' (reviews, cross-team communication) quietly did the work of synchronizing that understanding. His warning: as agents remove that friction, teams can lose the mechanism that kept their mental models aligned. For anyone running agents on a real codebase, it reframes code review and docs as alignment infrastructure, not overhead to automate away.
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