The Tacit Dimension

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1. 01

   The hybrid stack: RPA or deterministic code runs the steps that can be told; the agent takes the steps people know without being able to describe them.

   The Tacit Dimension · 1966

   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.

   “I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell.”

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