CONCEPT
Conventions (Becker)
The invisible infrastructure of creative work — shared understandings about materials, methods, forms, relationships, and standards that allow people to cooperate without negotiating every detail from scratch.
Becker's central insight about how creative worlds actually function: conventions are not rules in the sense laws are rules. Nobody writes them down. Nobody enforces them through explicit sanctions. They are maintained through practice — through the accumulated weight of thousands of instances in which people did things one way rather than another and found the one way worked. A convention persists because it solves a recurring problem. It disappears when the problem it solves ceases to exist. Software development runs on conventions as thoroughly as jazz: the sprint, the code review, the pull request, the frontend-backend division. Each solved a coordination problem and, in solving it, constrained what could be created and by whom. AI tools do not merely add capability — they destabilize the conventions themselves by dissolving the constraints those conventions were designed to address.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Conventions are invisible in the precise sense that water is invisible to a fish: not because they are hidden but because they are