The Legibility Crisis

AI Software Engineers are promising (or threatening, depending on the audience), but will they create more software than we can possibly understand?

Beware of the coming legibility crisis.

(Housekeeping note: Sorry for the long delay. If you haven't noticed, we launched a fantastic product called Auto Wiki. Auto Wiki converts your code into Wikipedia-style articles with citations, cutting time to fluency in a codebase by 50% and documentation time by 90%. You can see an example here: https://wiki.mutable.ai/unslothai/unsloth. I also promise to write “The AI Organization, part II”. My thinking has evolved significantly since that essay. I have learned so much since then from all the wonderful readers who reached out to me.)


1) In the ZIRP heyday of tech, people built software in a very ritualized way, copied from Google: we had OKRs, sprints, code review, PMs, managers, and of course, the almighty SWE.

Note: These things are not inherently bad and they helped create monsters like Airbnb.

There was some innovation, but many, like Tyler Cowen, rightly characterized this era as “The Great Stagnation”.

2) Then, after the COVID era, a meteor appeared: the OpenAI GPT series passed some utility threshold and a boom of products like GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT transformed how we work for the better. The future never seemed brighter.

3) But after the euphoria wore off, and especially with demos like Devin, people started to realize we will NEVER go back to the ZIRP era. Software as a field will transform fundamentally. Most software will be written by machines but will be managed by humans and there will be so much software to manage and understand. Very soon, companies will have millions of lines of code appearing every day that they do not really understand.

At Mutable.ai, we call this THE LEGIBILITY CRISIS. This lack of legibility is fragilizing. This is how the Romans lost their formula for concrete and why we haven't had manned moon missions in over fifty years. Complex technology is extremely fragile without a way to preserve it.

4) What's the solution? Something like AI jiu-jitsu, use AI to understand AI, like a snake eating itself. mutable.ai Auto Wiki converts code into Wikipedia-style articles with citations and graphs. This gives people a bird's eye view of their code and allows them to deeply and meditatively understand technology in a familiar format that preceded the AI boom. If AI chat is like asking a person a question, AI-generated docs are a restoration of the written word to its rightful place, the very thing that made civilization and indeed language models possible in the first place.

Our v2, which is coming early April, will allow you to easily view, filter, and alter the wikis with just a few easy commands.

The future is like the past, only better. We will build software in ways that would have shocked us even two years ago, but we will remain firmly in control, and the legibility crisis will have been averted.

I want to thank all our customers for supporting us, I want to thank all our early users, I want to thank the founding team for believing in our mission before it was clear we were on the right track, I want to thank our investors, in particular, I want to thank Nicolas Dessaigne and Anthony Goldbloom, I want to thank our friends and everyone who rooted for us. I love you all.

The future has never been brighter at mutable.ai. We have some very special announcements upcoming, and we're hiring! And we're also still onboarding customers on v2 of our wikis before they reach GA! Please feel free to contact me directly.

Thank you!
Omar, Founder/CEO