Robert Putnam

Foreword

By Edo Segal

The thing I almost missed was what disappeared between the people.

In Trivandrum, when each of my twenty engineers became capable of doing the work of twenty, I celebrated. I wrote about it in *You On AI* with genuine awe. Twenty-fold productivity. A hundred dollars a month. The future arriving on schedule and under budget.

What I did not write about — what I did not even notice until Robert Putnam's framework forced me to look — was what stopped happening in the spaces between those engineers once the tool made them self-sufficient.

The hallway questions dried up. The lunch-table arguments about architecture got quieter. The particular friction of one person reading another person's code and saying, "I think you're wrong about this," and the