

the original comment says “We should be able to retrain local models so they can develop an actual experience without prefilling the context.” - it turns out we can. Not sure why you’re trying to attach labels of user vs creator, when the premise already mentions retraining.














I’ve been thinking about this essay for a few hours now, and I can’t shake the feeling that, if we’re using “tacit knowledge” as an argument for retaining seniors engineers, it’ll fail miserably.
The examples have that “I don’t like it, but I can’t tell you why yet. Give me an hour.” pattern to them. The author says this knowledge can’t be extracted or transcribed, but isn’t that exactly what that senior engineer does after that hour has passed?
Well, it’s “impossible” in the same way that it’s impossible to a newcomer: because it’s unwritten; it requires knowledge from other sources. Currently. There’s nothing inherent about this kind of knowledge that prevents it from being written in the first place. The fact this knowledge is missing only tells us that someone has never bothered writing it down before. Perhaps they didn’t see the need, perhaps that wasn’t a priority. With automated systems writing code and documentation, well-managed projects will also be better at tracking this kind of knowledge and - finally - writing it down.
If you’re a senior engineer and can’t argue why something is or isn’t a good fit, and yet you are locked on either one of those… I don’t know what to tell you other than that, maybe, you lack communication skills.
I do think that projects have this sort of tacit knowledge to them, I’m not questioning that. But:
I don’t believe this is an argument in favor of senior engineers because it may be misinterpreted as ignorance (“If you can’t explain something to a first year student, then you haven’t really understood.” - Richard Feynman);
I’m not convinced this kind of knowledge would be required for a project to succeed;
I’m not convinced AI itself isn’t able to extract patterns from the project that we would call tacit knowledge. Pattern recognition is kind of their thing, after all.