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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

#151

Post by lelanthran »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #116
allending wrote: post #32

There's a certain irony in that the article itself is quite clearly assisted by AI. Not a criticism per se as I don't have a problem with AI assistance, but food for thought given the material being commented on.

Out of curiosity, what are you basing this on? The text has few of the obvious AI tells. The only thing that, to me, looks characteristic of LLM-generated text is the short and terse sentence structure, but this has been a "prestigious" way to write in English since Hemingway.

Blog posts aren't typically written like Hemingway.

Find some pre 2020 that are, and you'd have a point.

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

#152

Post by liendolucas »

I still code daily without any coding assistance mostly because I believe this is the way to not forget how things are done, even trivial things.

My main point against using AI is that I do not want to depend basically on anything when I'm in front of the screen (obviously not including, documentation, books, SO and alike).

I closely see people that are 100% dependent on AI for literally everything, even the most trivial daily tasks and I find that truly scarly because it means that brain effort drops drammatically to a minimum level. To be stolen mental effort is not a minor thing.

Giving away that at least for me means to become a dependent zombie. Knowledge comes basically from manual trial/error almost daily.

Technology being technology if anything has shown us that we can be pushed and manipulated in every single conceivable way. And in my opinion depending on AI is the ultimate way for companies to penetrate and manipulate a very delicate ability of a human being: to think and wonder about things.

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

#153

Post by adrian_b »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #121
palmotea wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I think that's still a symptom. The real problem is ideology: the monomaniacal focus on profit-making business, which infects our political leaders, down to capitalists and business leaders, down to the indoctrinated rank-and…

The US is stuck in this weird irony where they recognize that Soviet-style central planning is a disaster but can't recognize that it's what megacorps do when they're insulated from competition. Internal politics, perverse incentives and a system that can sustain massive inefficiencies right up until the point that it doesn't. In general productive economic activity generates a surplus and that surplus allows for sla…

Yes, many Americans and other Westerners believe that the so-called "socialist" economies, like those of the Soviet Union and of Eastern Europe were non-capitalist.

This is only an illusion created by the fact that the communists were careful to rename all important things, to fool the weaker minds that the renamed things are something else than what they really are.

In reality, the "socialist" economies were more capitalist than the capitalist economies of USA and Western Europe. They behaved exactly like the final stage of capitalism, where monopolies control every market and there is no longer any competition.

Unfortunately, after a huge sequence of mergers and acquisitions started in the late nineties of the last century, the economies of USA and of the EU states resemble more and more every year the former socialist economies, instead of resembling the US and W. European economies of a few decades ago.

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

#154

Post by yapyap »

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…

> The real issue, in my view, is not AI itself

in shootings technically the guns are not the issue since they dont fire on their own.. they do enable the ability to shoot though

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

#155

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #121
palmotea wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I think that's still a symptom. The real problem is ideology: the monomaniacal focus on profit-making business, which infects our political leaders, down to capitalists and business leaders, down to the indoctrinated rank-and…

The US is stuck in this weird irony where they recognize that Soviet-style central planning is a disaster but can't recognize that it's what megacorps do when they're insulated from competition. Internal politics, perverse incentives and a system that can sustain massive inefficiencies right up until the point that it doesn't. In general productive economic activity generates a surplus and that surplus allows for sla…

Yes - ultimately it's the same system. Far from being daring and innovatory, it's backward-looking, unimaginative, and bureaucratic.

Vision for the future is limited to grandiose fantasies straight out of 1950s pulps and the "heroic" creation of narcissistic corporations that are cynically extractive and treat employees and customers with equal contempt.

The differences which used to provide a convincing cover story - no single Great Leader, a functional consumer economy, votes that appear to make a difference - are being dismantled now.

What's left are the same mechanisms of total monitoring (updated with modern tech) and reality-denying totalitarian oppression, run for the exclusive benefit of a tiny oligarchy which self-selects the very worst people in the system.

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

#156

Post by mawadev »

I highly question the ability of companies to gauge the level of experience of any dev.

The distinction between junior, mid, senior, lead is a facade. It is a soft gradient that spans multiple areas, but is tainted and skewed by the technology du jour.

Technically you don't have to be an employed developer to become a senior developer. It boils down to your personal willingness to learn and invest time building.

What companies seek these days are people having the experience with (dysfunctional) organizational structure and working around the shortcomings of the organizations communication and funding patterns, nothing more.

Does that really make you senior or just politically versed?

The pattern shows up the most whenever failing software pokes holes in perception.

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

#157

Post by brabel »

pelorat wrote: post #124
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 the case of the military I'd say the real reason is political. After the fall of the Berlin wall, Europe collectively agreed (knowingly or not) that war is now a thing of the past and the goal should be the complete dismantling of militaries worldwide, starting with Europe. Lead by example, etc.

They agreed that war was a thing of the past, but still continued to push for NATO to allow new members anyway, ironically causing Russia (and China and everyone who is NOT in NATO) to suspect that war was NOT a thing of the past and therefore never quite abandoning their military completely. Unpopular opinion: the West should either NEVER have abandoned its military production (so as to maintain NATO actual preparedness for war, given that's the only reason for its existence) OR it should just have dismantled NATO and announced to the world that it strongly believes war is a thing of the past, and that other countries are advised to follow suit. But we actually chose the easy, halfway path: keep NATO, keep our militaries "looking strong" (which gives the signal our rivals should also do the same, obviously), but not actually be ready for any sort of major war and as the article points out, even lose actual capacity to become ready for war within any realistic timeframe. The worst possible outcome :(.

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

#158

Post by derf_ »

samiv wrote: post #109
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…

Why would anyone have a sight longer than a quarter? I mean how does long term thinking help the execs get their compensation this quarter? Sheesh..worst case scenario is that the work done now will benefit someone else when they've already left. Also when companies grow big enough "business" becomes the main business of the company. By that I mean everything unrelated to the actual original domain, such as playing i…

> ...any actual product RD and support is a real annoying cost that just cuts into the profits...

Worse, it might not generate a return. If you have enough profits, you just buy anyone who successfully produced something innovative. Let them take the risks. As Cisco used to say, "Silicon Valley is our R&D lab."

It is a very difficult mindset to argue against.

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

#159

Post by microtonal »

cbg0 wrote: post #145
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.

It should have the same flow as reviewing PRs from humans.

The problem is the LLMs completely change the equation. Before LLMs, beyond very junior (needs serious coaching) levels, reviewing was typically faster than writing the code that was reviewed. With LLMs, writing code is orders of magnitude faster than reviewing it. We already see open source projects getting buried in LLM slop and you have to find the real human or at least carefully curated contributions among the slop.

I would not be surprised if many open source projects will outright stop taking PRs. I have had the same feeling several times - if I'm communicating with an LLM through the GitHub PR interface, I'd rather just directly talk to an LLM myself.

But ending PRs is going to be painful for acquiring new contributors and training more junior people. Hopefully the tooling will evolve. E.g. I'd love have a system where someone has to open an issue with a plan first and by approving you could give them a 'ticket' to open a single PR for that issue. Though I would be surprised if GitHub and others would create features that are essentially there to rein in Copilot etc.

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

#160

Post by rglullis »

alecco wrote: post #41

Speak for yourself. I now dare to code much harder problems and learning is bliss. No more having to sit down to dig needle-in-haystack through horrible documentation or random Stack Overflow posts. LLMs are a magnificent tool if you use them correctly. They enable deep work like nothing before. The problem is the education system focused on passivity (obeyance), memorization, and standardized testing. And worst of a…

> Speak for yourself.

Even if you are the absolute unicorn who gets paid to "code much harder problems" and "learning", the rest of the industry exists to deliver actual products and services.

So unless you nurture some type of https://xkcd.com/208/ fantasy, this is not just about you. The industry as a whole needs to find a way to work with LLMs without automating programming away entirely, and the industry as a whole needs to find a way to ensure that newcomers are able to be productive even if code-generation tools are taken away from them.

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