“I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell.”Michael Polanyi · The Tacit Dimension · 1966 · The Tacit Dimension (1966), cap. 1 «Tacit Knowing»
What can be told gets coded; what is known but cannot be told goes to the agent, with approval.
The 2026 hybrid pattern: an orchestration layer (the agent) plans and handles exceptions; deterministic executors (RPA bots, APIs, scripts) do the steps; RPA vendors reposition their bots as the "execution layer". Design: every step is classified explicit (a rule exists, so code) or tacit (people say "it depends", so an agent with approval); the agent never touches the system of record directly, it calls an executor with validation; exceptions go to a human queue and become training data for the next rule. Polanyi's point: tacit knowledge does not become explicit because you ask for it; the agent takes it on through examples (resolved cases in the prompt, or fine-tuning, lesson 14). The measure: the exception rate should fall over time as rules are extracted.
Why it matters The part nobody could write into the procedure is the part worth an agent.