'The Oral Tradition That Built Software May Not Survive AI'

A historian-turned-software engineer warns that “so little is ever written down” by professional programmers in a new article for Fast Company: Perhaps there’s an early design doc, but then it turns out that everything was substantially revised before work began. Maybe there are a few wiki pages explaining known issues, some of which were solved a long time ago and others that have been left to molder in the codebase. Somebody might have left a comment in the code itself, but typically it’s a warning not to change something or else something else will break…