https://ole-laursen.blogspot.com/2016/01/stimergy.html

Part of the mindset is that when you see a co-worker end up in the wrong place with some new code, you ask yourself, can I do something to our code base to lower the probability of it happening again?

Because ants dont have business units. Most of us, programmers, are slaves to the business and we have to do what they want from us, not what we want or think is optimal to do. And the requirements can change often. How fast those changes would be notified by others in decentralized "ants approach"? Would the business survive with this approach?

"Why can't an orange be more like apples?" - The title is very stupid clickbait and the reason why people are clicking on it.

Why Can’t Programmers Be More Like Ants? Or a Lesson in Stigmergy (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10866532 - Jan 2016 (28 comments)

Case in point: "Only 30% of the ants do 70% of the work." https://blog.thefabulous.co/idle-time-productivity-lesson-an...

He laughed and laughed, as the window blue was turning darker and darker. Finally he regained his composure, sat upright, and asked me seriously:

“Why ants?”

“Ants never fail. Computer networks, I don’t care which one, TYMNET ARPANET INFONET CYBERNET CYPHERNET MICRONET MIDINETTE TELENET they fail regularly, several times a day, somewhere they fail. And the big computers too, you can’t rely on them, sooner or later, they go south and they leave you high and dry, if we’re really going to teleconference on this thing it should never fail. The only thing that never fail are insects.”

“I said, why ants?”

“Look at an ant. Talk about microminiaturization of the ant! Even with the best chips from Silicon Gulch do you know how big a computer would have to be to do all the things an ant does? Tons! Tons! And the ant does all that in its little head and when it finds a twig it has one program: ‘If you recognize something which is long, made of wood, and hard, pick it up and put it on top of the ant-hill.’ Now that I call a program. And if the ant can’t do it by itself, another one will come and help, and another, until they do it. And you can step on them it won’t stop the ultimate result, and a crazy Frenchman named Remi Chauvin who is a genius explained to me how he would put twigs in tall glasses to see what the ants will do and he digs cliffs for them, yet they always manage to complete their program. A computer scientist who doesn’t understand ants is a man who doesn’t know what reliability means.”

“So you would build the computer equivalent of the ant, in hardware?”

“Right, and it would be so cheap, it would have its own little memory and it would have its own little programs, and it would go around looking for places to apply itself, and it would be disposable, disposable computers by the millions, crawling around and keeping their society going no matter what, so we humans can always find one when we need it and make it do something useful, make it work for us.”

— The Network Revolution: Confessions of a Computer Scientist, Jacques Vallee (1982) <https://books.google.com/books?id=6f8VqnZaPQwC&pg=PA206>

After all, as it says, ants are not very intelligent themselves yet manage to do amazing things due to stigmergy.

The position that all humans are just interchangeable resources where you can have 80 lbs of human resources or 180 lbs of human resources, like a coal or oil, is ultimately a nihilistic view that strips us all of all humanity.

if you, capitalist, want developers as interchangeable economic units, you can use LLMs