Not All Friction Is the Same

Lately there are many posts celebrating the death of friction, praising how AI removes the friction of writing code and increases development velocity. But is friction always bad? From my current personal perspective, for example, the friction a shelter wall provides when a rocket hits it is good friction. But let’s take a less sensitive example. When Git came along, it brought a real change to how we manage source code. Anyone could create branches locally. Branching became trivial and cheap, merging became easy. Multiple developers could work on the same code in parallel. A lot of friction that central version control systems used to impose was removed. But that also increased the velocity at which changes could reach the main codebase. To regain visibility and control over those changes, we introduced a new intentional point of friction: Pull Requests. With PRs, a change becomes visible before it is merged. Someone else reviews it. We can discuss it. CI gates can run. PRs deliberate