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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, argues that the most valuable engineering expertise—pattern recognition, unwritten conventions, design intuition—is structurally inaccessible to AI tools and can only be transmitted through apprenticeship.

May 19, 2026 · essay · cekrem

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Topics

  • engineering-craft
  • ai-assisted-coding
  • software-engineering
  • developer-productivity
  • future-of-work

Cited by

  • AI-assisted coding

    Using LLMs as coding collaborators spans a spectrum from inline suggestion to fully autonomous multi-agent pipelines, with active debate about reliability, skill atrophy, security exposure, and what human oversight must remain.

  • Developer productivity

    Developer productivity spans individual workflow habits, organizational systems, and AI tooling — and the sources collectively argue that output speed is the least reliable measure of it.

  • Engineering craft

    Engineering craft is the accumulated discipline of writing, organizing, and maintaining software well — spanning code design, tooling fluency, communication, and the judgment to know when technical excellence actually changes outcomes.

  • Future of work

    Automation and AI are reshaping who does what in organizations, but the harder problems are structural: how firms hire, onboard, retain tacit knowledge, and decide which human roles remain irreplaceable.

  • Software engineering

    Software engineering spans craft, process, and judgment — how code is structured, tested, reviewed, deployed, and maintained — and the sources collected here collectively interrogate each layer as AI tooling reshapes who does what and why.

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