The Tower Keeps Rising
TLDR
A software engineer argues that AI coding assistants may undermine the shared understanding that coordinates large-scale software projects, similar to how the Tower of Babel collapsed when people lost common language. Unlike the biblical story where communication breakdown halts construction, AI agents can continue making changes to codebases without developers needing to coordinate or comprehend each other's modifications. The result is that systems grow increasingly incoherent without the immediate failure that would signal the problem, making architectural decay invisible until critical.
Why it matters
AI removes friction in understanding software project context and shared language, but can result in code that looks strange while removing the friction of human understanding. The shared language of a project lives in documentation, code review, conversations, and other places.
