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Friction between engineers is not pure waste — it is the process by which one person's understanding of a system becomes shared with another, and by which both discover whether they still agree on how the system works; this friction synchronizes people.
Ronacher's core thesis: the slowness of pre-agent collaboration wasn't just overhead — it actively synchronized people's shared understanding, a function now at risk as coding agents remove that friction. ✦ AI generated
Armin Ronacher · Simon Willison's Weblog · 2026-07-14 · original ↗
Some of it was the process by which your understanding became mine, and by which both of us discovered whether we still agreed about how the system worked. This friction synchronizes people.
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- ·Collaboration friction synced understanding, not pure waste
- ·Your understanding became mine through the process
- ·Disagreements about the system surfaced through friction
- ·Coding agents strip out this synchronizing friction
- ·Shared understanding between engineers now at risk
- ·Speed gained may cost alignment on how systems work
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explains mechanism → The real shared language of a software project isn't English or Python — it's the common understanding of what its concepts mean, where the boundaries are, which invariants matter, who owns what, and why the system has the shape it does.Armin Ronacher · Simon Willison's Weblogexplains mechanism → This shared understanding is rarely written down in one place; it lives partly in documentation and code, but also in code review, conversations, arguments, and the experience of explaining a change to someone else.Armin Ronacher · Simon Willison's Weblogextends → Before agents, shared understanding between engineers was maintained largely by friction — needing to read someone else's code, ask them questions, and coordinate with dependent teams before making a change, which was slow.Armin Ronacher · Simon Willison's Weblog