The Coordination Collapse
Every productivity shift in the history of organised work has followed the same sequence: a new capability appears, the coordination infrastructure that existed to manage the old way of working becomes visible as overhead, and it is removed. The telephone switchboard. The typing pool. The ledger clerk. The dispatch coordinator. This paper traces that arc through the present moment — where AI is exposing the coordination layer in software engineering as the same kind of artefact — and lays out what engineering leaders should be doing now, not when the cuts have already happened to them.
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