No Man Is an Island

In this post, I argue that individual intellectual activity can only be sustained in an intellectual community of other humans. AI dissolves these communities, which in turn makes private intellectual activity rarer. The Case of Software Some years ago, when it became clear that AI would solve software engineering, my thinking was: In my professional life, I’m happy to move one level up to become a manager of AI agents. I’m literate, I’m a good technical writer, I can describe what I want and let AI agents write the code. In my own time, I can keep doing the things I care about because I enjoy them intrinsically. This is the “intellectual” side of software engineering: reading technical blog posts and papers, learning new programming languages, designing new programming languages, writing technical essays, writing code for my tiny open source projects. The second point has not quite worked out. What actually happened? First, the discourse of software engineering became worse. As I…