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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

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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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