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The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

techtrenches.dev

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Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#81

Post by hnfong »

teiferer wrote: post #73
cladopa wrote: post #52

People are not perfect. I went to Ukraine just days before the invasion. Travel and Hotels in Kiev had become extremely cheap. You asked the Ukrainians about the possible invasion. "Not going to happen" everybody said."Russia talks always aggressively, but never does anything". They did not properly prepare and as a result lost 20% of its territory in days. Days after that I was back is Austria and could not stop thi…

In hindsight, it's easy to be smart. You picked two examples where somebody said "never gonna happen" and then it happened. How about the countless examples where somebody said the same and then the thing actually didn't happen? Take millions playing the lottery. To each of them, I can confidently say "you won't win, not gonna happen". For almost all of them I'll be right. There will be one who wins, were I was wrong…

GP also probably had a sampling bias. The ones who were actually concerned about the impending Russian invasion presumably fled out of the country (or at least, away from the major cities to rural areas that probably see less fighting)

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#82

Post by acomjean »

vishnugupta wrote: post #60
jdw64 wrote: post #17

The real issue, in my view, is not AI itself. The problem is a management pattern: removing people and organizational slack because they don’t generate immediate profit, and then expecting the knowledge to still be there when it’s needed. Short-term cost cutting leads to less junior hiring, and removes the slack that experienced engineers need in order to teach. As a result, tacit knowledge stops being transferred. W…

> removing people and organizational slack You are spot on w.r.t every assertion you've made. When bean-counters took over the ecosystem they optimised immediate profitability over everything else. Which in turn means, in their mind, every part of the system needs to be firing at 100% all the time. There's no room for experimentation, repair, or anything else. I've commented about lack of slack on several times here…

I’ll note at the end of the last century I worked at IBM research which had a budget of 6 Billion dollars. Management was trying very hard to get better return on that investment. Even today IBM though often ridiculed in the tech space (sometimes they do deserve it) spends a lot on R&D.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#83

Post by the-smug-one »

cladopa wrote: post #52

People are not perfect. I went to Ukraine just days before the invasion. Travel and Hotels in Kiev had become extremely cheap. You asked the Ukrainians about the possible invasion. "Not going to happen" everybody said."Russia talks always aggressively, but never does anything". They did not properly prepare and as a result lost 20% of its territory in days. Days after that I was back is Austria and could not stop thi…

I'd say that Ukraine were very prepared for the invasion, though? They managed to survive for the first 2 weeks, leading to a long-term war. The Donbas war had already been going on for 8 years, and I don't think Ukrainians were under some illusion that those weren't Russians.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#84

Post by 0xpgm »

raincole wrote: post #77

First of all this is clearly AI-assist writing (being charitable here). And the premise makes no sense anyway. The only risk of forgetting how to make shells is when other countries are making shells more efficiently. Non-western countries are not going to reject AI-coding, nor are they going to make software more efficiently by hand.

Programmers in non-western countries may not be able to afford $100 per month on vibe coding.

They may keep taking the longer and harder route of a mixture of AI and hand coding.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#85

Post by [deleted] »

anonzzzies wrote: post #65
LeCompteSftware wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of the article is that sometimes the "old ways" really means "not particularly profitable or necessary in the short term" but the bill comes due in a crisis. The reason US/EU manufacturing was "the old ways" is that people could make easier money with financial engineering, an insight that extended all the way to Raytheon. COBOL is a bad example, but higher-level languages vs. assembly is not. If you write…

But these are hard IT things a human programmer really struggles with as well. What % of software written is that? Very very low. Most software is dull and requires business vagueness to be translated into deterministic logic and interfaces; LLMs are pretty great at that as it is. If humans use their old ways to fix complex problems and llms do the rest, we still only need a handful of those humans. For now.

[deleted]

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#86

Post by simondotau »

Animats wrote: post #13

> They can’t tell you what the AI got wrong. AI code generators are trolls. They confidently plausible content which is partly wrong. Then humans try to find their errors. This is not fun. It has no flow.

I beg to differ, insofar as my own experience has been the exact opposite. I enjoy fixing other people's mistakes. And I especially enjoy outsmarting the LLMs. I find that I can obsessively breathe down the neck of an LLM for far longer than I could ever stay in the traditional flow state.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#87

Post by xantronix »

ktallett wrote: post #21

We have both forgotten how to make things and also decided we can make more profit letting someone else make everything for every market. We have moved to a generation fixated on maximizing profit. However there is logic there as the cost to access the ability to make things is prohibitively expensive. As someone who makes open hardware with a nod to the environment and reusability, you can not justify or even find m…

No matter what happens to the viability of software development as a career, I will always care about the craft as I have done the past twenty years and change. The imperatives to adopt LLMs in situations where they do not benefit me nor my work is what is driving me away. I have to agree with latexr; the people who seem to benefit the most from the current moment are those who see software as a means to an end without much concern for quality, longevity, nor customer experience.

Why is speed-to-market such an important metric? I do not understand the need to mimic the largest players in the industry, nor do I see any particularly profound long term benefits to first mover advantage.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#88

Post by netcan »

jdw64 wrote: post #17

The real issue, in my view, is not AI itself. The problem is a management pattern: removing people and organizational slack because they don’t generate immediate profit, and then expecting the knowledge to still be there when it’s needed. Short-term cost cutting leads to less junior hiring, and removes the slack that experienced engineers need in order to teach. As a result, tacit knowledge stops being transferred. W…

>. In many domains, productivity is already sufficient. What’s being sold is workforce reduction.

This is a blindspot to many. People working on entrepreneurial projects need to build a lot. They start with nothing. They need (for example) features. There's a lot to do.

Most firms are not that. Visa, Salesforce, LinkedIn or whatnot. They have a product. They have features. They have been at it for a while. They also have resources. They are very often in a position of finding nails for a "write more software" hammer.

It's unintuitive because they all have big wishlist and to do lists and and a/b testing system for pouring software into but...

If there were known "make more software, make more money" opportunities available, they would have already done them.

Actual growth and new demand needs to come from arenas outside of this. Eg companies that suck at software(either making or acquiring) might be able to get the job done.

The Problem, bringing this back to the article, is fungibility. A lot of this "human capital" stuff cannot be easily repackaged. It's a "living" thing. Talent and skills pipelines can be cut off, and vanish.

A danger in Ai coding (and other fields) is that it leverages preexisting human capital and doesn't generate any for later.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#89

Post by wiseowise »

cladopa wrote: post #52

People are not perfect. I went to Ukraine just days before the invasion. Travel and Hotels in Kiev had become extremely cheap. You asked the Ukrainians about the possible invasion. "Not going to happen" everybody said."Russia talks always aggressively, but never does anything". They did not properly prepare and as a result lost 20% of its territory in days. Days after that I was back is Austria and could not stop thi…

> They did not properly prepare and as a result lost 20% of its territory in days.

Ukraine has been preparing since 2014. Without preparation there would be a Russian talking head right now in Kyiv.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#90

Post by solid_fuel »

gitowiec wrote: post #74
Nux wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

India for the most part.

[flagged]

Take your racist attitude elsewhere or even better, keep it yourself. The comment chain was only about where IT work is being outsourced.
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