Do the Illegible
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Drawing on Peter Naur's 1985 essay 'Programming as Theory Building' and James C. Scott's 'Seeing Like a State', the author argues that the most valuable knowledge in software development is 'illegible' — the implicit understanding programmers hold about why systems are built the way they are. This tacit theory cannot be fully captured in code or documentation. The author connects this to modern vibe-coding, arguing it moves in precisely the wrong direction by ceding theory-building to AI systems owned by large corporations. Instead, developers should use AI as a tool to deepen their own understanding rather than outsource it entirely, and should be treated as intellectual professionals rather than interchangeable components.
