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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.
Ronacher argues that a project's true shared language is the tacit, collective understanding engineers hold about the system, not the literal code or prose used to describe it. ✦ AI generated
Armin Ronacher · Simon Willison's Weblog · 2026-07-14 · original ↗
The shared language of a software project is not English or Python but it is 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.
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- ·Not English, not Python — it's shared understanding
- ·Covers what concepts mean and where boundaries lie
- ·Includes which invariants matter and who owns what
- ·Explains why the system has the shape it does
- ·Code and prose are just artifacts, not the language itself
- ·Real alignment lives in engineers' collective mental model
- ·Teams that share this understanding communicate faster
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Mechanism · 3
Conversations are becoming the source of code, with code as a downstream artifact.Nathan Sobo · Syntax · conf 80%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 · conf 60%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.Armin Ronacher · Simon Willison's Weblog · conf 60%