The Tower Keeps Rising

A philosophical reflection on how AI coding agents, while boosting individual productivity, may erode the shared architectural understanding that makes large software projects coherent. Using the Tower of Babel as a metaphor, the author argues that the friction of traditional code collaboration — reading others' code, asking questions, coordinating changes — was also the mechanism by which teams built a common mental model of their systems. Agents remove that friction, allowing construction to continue even after shared understanding has collapsed, making the degradation invisible until it's too late.