The oral tradition that built software may not survive AI

Until I became a software engineer at 32, my whole professional life was organized around the written word. I was a historian, one who was firmly anchored in books and archives and articles. I switched careers for reasons that aren’t important here and that I’ve written about elsewhere ; suffice it to say, the job market for historians was sufficiently terrible that I wanted to do something else. I became a software engineer because I liked the problem-solving and design aspects of it. I work as a backend engineer for Hagerty Insurance. Somehow, I’ve been able to fit into it, perhaps even do well at it. But the thing that continues to confound me in so many ways in this job is that so little is ever written down. The reality is this: Software development is an oral tradition. Especially when you’re just starting out as an engineer, you’re not working on brand-new code; you’re probably in a legacy code base. You’re going to face more questions than answers about what stuff does or why it was written the way that it was, and when you go looking for answers, there’s not going to be much written down. Perhaps there’s an early design doc, but then it turns out that everything was substantially revised before work began. Maybe there are a few wiki pages explaining known issues, some of which were solved a long time ago and others that have been left to molder in the codebase. Somebody might have left a comment in the code itself, but typically it’s a warning not to change something or else something else will break. At this level, being a historian turned out to be an unexpected cultural advantage. Historians are used to reconstructing stories from fragments rather than finding neat explanations in the archive. So when it comes time to make a change in an unfamiliar codebase, you usually wind up finding another developer to ask for help. They’ve been there long enough to understand what’s happening under the hood, and they might be able to explain why changing one seeming