The oral tradition that built software may not survive AI

For decades, software engineering has relied on something surprisingly fragile: veteran developers passing down institutional knowledge from person to person. As AI transforms how code gets written and maintained, that culture of inherited memory may be starting to break apart. 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.