Good Culture is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI

Good Culture is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI, by Gregor Ojstersek.

Programming may eventually look like operating a telephone switchboard: once important, then mostly executed by AI coding agents. Software engineering is different. The job is to identify the problem, define it, make tradeoffs, live with constant tech debt and decide whether the result is correct.

AI makes programming cheaper. That moves the current engineering bottleneck upstream. When code can be produced in minutes, bad assumptions also move faster.

So trust, shared context, honest communication, and the ability to challenge each other matter more.

AI amplifies velocity. Culture decides the direction.

AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it’s clearly a useful one.

By Linus Torvalds, on the Linux kernel mailing list.

We may need less programming. We will still need engineering.