“My humanity is caught up and inextricably bound up in others… I am human because I belong, I participate, I share.”
Desmond Tutu, on the philosophy of Ubuntu, No Future Without Forgiveness (1999)
We are growing less connected. We struggle with it as a society. We are fighting it internally at our company. I see it impacting my children. We can talk face to face with anyone in the world in an instant, but one-quarter of the world feels lonely [1].
Part of it is related to COVID. That’s when remote work took over at our company. We have a pair of developers who co-work over a video call most of the day. They have a strong collaborative relationship that spans years. But most of us have not established that relationship. I’m among them. I do most of my work alone, and only talk to my team in brief standups each morning that sometimes feel more ritual than relational. Keeping our relationships real requires constant vigilance. Ignore it and those relationships either wither or explode. One of the greatest virtues of a small company like ours is that three of us have a quorum. We can still make effective critical decisions over a fifteen minute video call.
A fresh point of division is AI. We don’t all agree that we should use LLMs. Some find it a moral affront. If you don’t know that point of view, I highly recommend you read Cory Doctorow’s Reverse Centaur’s Guide to AI [2]. Others on our team believe AI offers an enormous advantage. We are building functional prototypes in an hour, uncovering security vulnerabilities, and making successive 10x improvements to performance. I am grateful we don’t all agree on when or how to use AI. Disagreement is vital to our survival.
AI’s effect on our social fabric is more insidious than just causing disagreement. It actively prevents us from working together. Reviewing someone else’s AI-generated content has gone from deeply unpleasant in 2025 to impossible in 2026. AI;DR (AI; Didn’t Read) [3] is how we respond when someone pastes content from an AI, but reviewing each other’s work is part of our social fabric. It is how we learn and keep up with what others are thinking and building. Maybe that doesn’t happen in the code anymore. But where should it happen now? Our agile methodologies aren’t working well. We need new methodologies–but those take years or decades to form. We are now able to move ten times faster, but we don’t have the controls that allow us to steer at this speed.
If we could accelerate human collaboration, we could better capitalize on the speed with which we can implement ideas using LLMs. This is perhaps the most important problem we face. Our company SpiffWorks is focused on this problem, and we believe transparency, and shared understanding around workflows is central to this acceleration.
Speed is not always good. When you spend hours on a problem, and you solve it through commitment, force of will, and a handful of creative sparks–you are connected to that solution. You want people to understand it. You are proud of it. You will argue for it with passion. You will stand on chairs and cry its glory from rooftops. When you vibe code a solution in twenty minutes, half of which were spent clearing your nails … well, it is great in the short term. But it’s soul cancer.
Twenty-five Fields Medalists came together this past week to issue a public statement about AI. They didn’t do it to complain about their work being stolen, or the total lack of attribution. That isn’t the main concern. The main concern is the destruction of their social fabric.
“[we all need] to make sure that, as AI changes the way work is done, we do not lose sight of what that work was meant to achieve in the first place.” [4]
These Fields Medalists are expressing concern about the health of their relationships with one another. The public statement speaks of the value of bringing in fresh minds, and the importance of participating in the long struggle. Remember being in school? When did you learn? I suspect it was not when you were memorizing tables and formulas, but when you were applying them to solve a problem, to overcome a challenge that captured your imagination. That moment is central to my happiness. When we lost our opportunities to collaborate and learn from each other, we lost a fundamental human right.
We have a fundamental right to human connection. We have a fundamental right to learn. Things that deprive us of that, or seek to restrict it, should be met with obstinacy and wrath.
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My company is SpiffWorks. We build software that improves collaboration for the key workflows in your organization. We value transparency and shared understanding of business processes. We believe that human connection will be the key capability shared by all successful organizations over the next decade. We help companies capture AI’s benefits and sidestep its potential dangers to communication.
[1] https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/512618/almost-quarter-world-feels-lonely.aspx
[2] https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49336573
[4] mathandai.org
[5] El Anatsui is a sculptor known for connecting aluminum pieces sources from alcohol recycling stations - sewing them together with copper wire - they look like frabric quilts when hung from a wall.