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.
Claude Code was released a little over a year ago. In that short time, software engineering has been completely transformed. Materially, it might be positive: higher productivity, though at the cost of a messier codebase. Socially, it has been a disaster.
The discourse around software engineering has gotten dumber. It’s like everyone in the industry lost 30 IQ points. People used to talk about compilers, type systems, logic. Now they talk about “prompts”, “harnesses”, “loops”. The discourse is narrower, shallower, and more repetitive. There’s only so many times I can hear about “agentic harnesses” before I lose my mind.
