[hn_throwaway_99]

Thanks so much! I hadn't heard of Polanyi's paradox before but it is exactly what I was talking about. The Wikipedia entry even highlights the problem for AI-driven development:

> Polanyi's paradox has been widely considered to identify a major obstacle in the fields of AI and automation, since programming an automated task or system is difficult unless a complete and fully specific description of the procedure is available.

[rcxdude]

I'd say the opposite in some ways: it's arguably the reason for the bitter lesson and ML techniques tending to beat other approaches, because they work by giving examples as opposed to trying to articulate the rules in an explicit manner.