Posts tagged "systems thinking"

„Nah ist / Und schwer zu fassen der Gott. / Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch.” — Friedrich Hölderlin, Patmos (1803)

(Near is, / and difficult to grasp, the god. / But where danger is, grows / the saving power also.)

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post titled Thinking with Claude: why Cyborg writing works better than Centaur writing. In the LinkedIn comments, a reader named Christopher pushed back: Leaning on AI to help me write, he argued, was training my brain to “surrender executive function to external sources.” Examples: freed prisoners overwhelmed by everyday choices, ex-military struggling with civilian life, people leaving long-term institutional care. The source doesn’t matter, he wrote. The offloading pattern is the same.

While my initial answer was along the lines of “using your executive function is a choice”, I think it’s not that simple, after all, and I owe Christopher a real answer. In fact, his comment pushed me into a weeks-long thinking journey, during which I looked for research, came across interesting related articles, and reflected a lot on my own AI use. I also jammed with Claude, and yes: I used the very tool Christopher warned me about to think harder about his warning. We’ll get to that contradiction later.

TL;DR: AI made the coding part of software fast, and that speed didn’t create chaos so much as expose where your organization was already slow: the hand-offs between teams. The fix isn’t a better tool, it’s better wiring. We rewired Dev and Ops once already and called it DevOps. The next wall, between business and engineering, is coming down the same way. Here’s how to see it, and one thing you can do tomorrow.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.

Specialization is for insects.

— Robert A. Heinlein

When I read a recent article about Expert Generalists on Martin Fowler’s blog, I immediately changed my LinkedIn title. Finally, someone had named what I’d been doing for 27 years without realizing it!