I totally missed/muddled the 'clarity' and 'unity' arguments in my response. It would have been a great final point. There is a big difference between being direct and being clear. When there is an issue, what I am often trying to communicate is my goal to get information and to get the rest of the team on the same page. I am seeking clarity and unity and the tool I am using is communication. But there is a difference between seeking clarity/unity and being direct. My points stand about the process of thought and the style of communication there. You can be clear without being direct and being direct is often not the right answer and not even possible.

In a previous life I was a pilot. Communication in aviation is exceptionally clear and direct. It is that way because time matters and understanding matters but also because the vast majority of situations have been clearly identified, thought out and formalized well before you are in the air. I suspect other environments have this too, like an operating room. In training we had a system of 'shacks' where if you messed up on the radio in the pattern the day before you owed a 'shack' (a beer to the common fridge) by the next day. The comms there were ridiculously direct and clear but also incredibly formalized. There were exact words for exact situations and the tree of possible interactions, and the communication required, were almost 100% memorized. However, as soon as things got a little out of the norm so did the comms. You really can't have perfect 'direct' communication with dynamic systems. The shack system was great because it shows both sides of the communication world. It emphasized the incredibly direct communication world but then when your mistakes came to light there generally was a lot of indirect communication involved discussing the shack.

I would hate to think that software design is so well thought out that all communication could be formalized like aviation or an operating room. It would mean the age of the code assistant really is going to take engineering away because anything so perfectly formalized can also easily be learned by an LLM.