Reading / 2026-05/2026-05-19t110710-the-tacit-dimension-why-your-best-engineers-cant-tell-you
The Tacit Dimension: Why Your Best Engineers Can't Tell You What They Know
Drawing on Michael Polanyi's philosophy of tacit knowledge, this piece argues that the most valuable engineering expertise — pattern recognition, system intuition, unwritten conventions — is structurally inaccessible to AI coding tools and can only be transmitted through apprenticeship.
May 19, 2026 · essay · Christian Ekrem, cekrem.github.io
Topics
- software-engineering
- ai-assisted-coding
- engineering-craft
- developer-productivity
- software-architecture
Cited by
- AI-assisted coding
AI coding assistants accelerate development but introduce tradeoffs around skill atrophy, codebase design, verification, and security that shape how much value they actually deliver.
- Developer productivity
Developer productivity spans tooling choices, organizational alignment, and the human skills those tools depend on, with a growing body of sources questioning whether AI-assisted workflows deliver on their promise without eroding the judgment they require.
- Engineering craft
The discipline of writing code and building systems with deliberate attention to correctness, clarity, and maintainability, spanning language implementation, shell tooling, component architecture, and CI pipeline integrity.
- Software architecture
Recurring patterns across component design, API validation, durable execution, and multi-agent systems show that good software architecture consistently pushes complexity to boundaries and keeps individual units of code focused on a single concern.
- Software engineering
A broad discipline covering architecture, tooling, testing, and craft decisions that determine how software is built, maintained, and extended — a theme connecting sources on agent reliability, CSS platform primitives, component design, shell scripting, and more.
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