CONCEPT
Intellectual Manageability
Dijkstra's benchmark for adequate software: a system is intellectually manageable when a human being can reason about it — not by holding it all in view but by understanding each part and trusting their composition.
Intellectual manageability is the property Dijkstra made central to his judgment of software quality, and it is the property AI-generated code most directly threatens. A system is intellectually manageable when a competent human being can reason about it — not by comprehending the whole at once, which is impossible for any real system, but by understanding each component independently and trusting the composition. The trust is not psychological; it is grounded in the separation of concerns and structured construction that make composition valid. Manageability is therefore not a size constraint — big systems can be manageable if their parts are small and their interfaces clean — but a structural property of the relationship between the system and any mind that might seek to understand it.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept underwrites nearly everything else in Dijkstra's framework. Elegance is manageability at the level of the individual program. Separation of concerns is the discipline that produces