AI doesn't work in a team, and how to fix it
To me, all these IDEs and Claudes seem to have one basic problem: they don't work as a team. You've got your own context, your own tricks, principles, gates, everything you've set up for yourself. My context is totally different. The devs have a third one. And when we're building one shared product, each of us playing by our own rules, the question becomes: where and when is all of this supposed to sync up? And when the edits conflict, whose is right?
The simplest example is tabs versus spaces. Your agent always uses tabs, mine uses spaces. You commit code with tabs. My agent sees it's off from our standard and switches it to spaces. Your agent sees spaces and puts the tabs back. And this tug of war between agents goes on forever, even where agreeing should be trivial, just because my agent has my context and yours has yours.
My fix is drastic. The problem is that we're trying to boost a person with an agent inside the old processes: do the same thing, just faster. But that's the wrong goal. We shouldn't do the same thing faster, we should build new processes that weren't possible before and are now. To do that, you have to take the agent off the personal level and move it to the team level. All the agreements, the checks, the styles, the gates, the architecture, should live at the team or company level, not the personal one. At the personal level it's called character. At the team level it's called corporate culture.
What's left at the personal level is just a thin layer. I think of it as a butler. It knows you well, it knows your habits, it gets what you meant even when you didn't spell it out. Its job is to take the task off your hands, maybe flesh it out the way you would have, and hand it to the corporate agent system. It also manages your attention and your schedule: "hey, something urgent just came up, let's drop this and talk now."
The team work itself is a separate thing. It should be one corporate AI, not a bunch of personal AIs trying to sync their contexts over Git or out loud, which is inefficient. And it's not just documents and text, it's processes too, and processes are code. So somewhere there has to be a shared server where all of this runs and builds up. Taken to the limit, you get an AI company: not people boosted by agents, but the company itself as one big agent, or an ensemble of agents. And people in two roles: either they build and maintain the system, or they act as experts. When the system breaks, we say "this would be better done this way," which is how we train it. And there are still purely manual steps where you need a human: sending money, say, or approving something.