Cybernetics and AI Agents: A Forgotten Old Language
A team of eight engineers has wired AI coding agents into their development pipeline. The agents take tickets off the top of the queue and ship pull requests faster than humans can review them. Six months in, the dashboards look enviable. Test coverage sits at 84%. The p99 latency on every changed endpoint stays under 100 ms. Merge throughput is up 3× since the agents went live. The Friday retrospective is short, because there is little to retrospect on.
Then a competitor ships a feature. It is not a clever feature. Their users had been asking for it on a public forum for six months, and the team's own users had been asking for it on the team's own forum for almost as long. No one on the team noticed. The competitor's launch lands in Slack on a Tuesday, and the room goes quiet, because everyone is asking the same question at once: which part of our system was supposed to catch this?
The honest answer is: no part. Not because someone forgot to build it, but because the team's architecture vocabulary has no word for it.