The Exit Trap

The Exit Trap is the condition in which exit is individually rational but systemically catastrophic — and, crucially, in which the systemic catastrophe cannot be averted by recruiting new members because the process that produced the departing members has itself been destroyed. In the AI transition, the senior engineers who departed cannot be replaced by more senior practitioners because the apprenticeship that produced them — the years of manual debugging, the slow accumulation of architectural intuition through hands-on struggle — is being dismantled by the very tools that prompted their exit. The trap closes when the transmission mechanism is severed. After that, the departure of each senior practitioner is not merely the loss of that practitioner but the loss of the pipeline through which their successors would have been produced.