CONCEPT
Source Noise
Vagueness, ambiguity, and contradiction present in the originator's mental model before entering any communication channel—the signal quality AI faithfully amplifies.
Source noise is the category of signal imperfection originating in the thinker's own cognitive architecture—the incomplete mental models, unexamined assumptions, conceptual ambiguities that exist before any organizational communication occurs. When a designer's understanding of a problem is vague, that vagueness is source noise. When her mental model contains contradictions, those contradictions are source noise. When she has not fully separated concerns in her own thinking, that conflation is source noise. Unlike transmission noise (which organizational restructuring can reduce), source noise cannot be eliminated by changing team size, reporting structures, or communication channels. It can only be addressed through the designer's own cognitive work—the examination, clarification, and coherent structuring of her thinking before that thinking becomes architectural instruction.
In The You On AI Field Guide
AI's elimination of transmission noise makes source noise the dominant determinant of architectural quality. In the organizational model, both noise types contributed to degradation—transmission noise from the chain of interpreters, source noise from the original thinker. When transmission noise drops to near-zero, the system reflects the source signal