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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

#161

Post by Aaargh20318 »

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…

> What AI is being sold as right now is not really productivity. In many domains, productivity is already sufficient. What’s being sold is workforce reduction.

And workforce reduction is a nobel goal. In fact, I think it's one of the most important things humanity should focus on. We should strive for a workforce of zero. Humans currently was an enormous amount of their life working instead of more worthwhile pursuits.

I despise the rhetoric around this, we didn't "lose jobs" over AI, we saved ourselves a lot of work. What it does do is highlight a problem in our current society: the link between labour and the access to resources (e.g. money).

I don't think that AI is the ultimate answer to the problem of work, but it can contribute to it.

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

#162

Post by rini17 »

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.

It's subtler than that. Europe was just constantly reminded by its big brother not to duplicate NATO structures, which are dependent on the US.

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

#163

Post by t43562 »

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.

Who really truly enjoys that and doesn't see it as a chore?

I find the real way to review other people's code is to program with it and then I start seeing where the problems are much more clearly. I would do a review and spot nothing important then start working on my own follow-on change and immediately run into issues.

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

#164

Post by brabel »

mawadev wrote: post #156

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…

> Technically you don't have to be an employed developer to become a senior developer.

That's incredibly unlikely. Do you need to be an employed surgeon to become a senior (or whatever they call it) surgeon??

I very much doubt you can be senior without having actually spent years doing it professionally. The experience is everything, no book will give you the sort of understanding you need. That's unfortunately human nature, we are not capable to learn and internalize things simply from reading or watching others do it, we absolutely need to do it ourselves to truly learn. Didactic books always have exercises for this reason.

You can learn facts and techniques from books, obviously. But just because you've read a book about Michelin restaurants that you can now be a Michelin Chef.

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

#165

Post by microtonal »

SanjayMehta wrote: post #137
rezonant wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tropes that AI introduces into articles are very noticeable, quite annoying, and very unnatural -- they unfortunately don't write well. It seems people use them to "polish" up their writing but in reality it would have read better if they hadn't. My current pet peave is using period instead of comma, as in: > My people lived the other side of this equation. Not the factory floor. The receiving end. Ostensibly thi…

People have also started copying the AI tropes, especially your period/comma example.

I am not sure if it is necessarily copied. A lot of influencer-style people used some of these patterns (periods, not X but Y). So I'm not sure who is copying who?

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

#166

Post by AnthonyMouse »

adrian_b wrote: post #153
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

Everyone wants to tag the evil with their opposition's name. The evil is concentration of power. But no one wants to call it that because then they can't pretend that it's something different when they're doing it themselves.

Witness the people who keep proposing to solve market consolidation with higher taxes. Higher taxes go to the government, and therefore the interests that have captured the government. Are we going to solve it by taking money from Warren Buffet and giving it to Larry Ellison? Do we benefit from increased funding for Palantir? No, you have to break up the consolidated markets through some combination of antitrust enforcement and peeling back the regulatory capture that prevents new competitors from entering the market.

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

#167

Post by defrost »

roenxi wrote: post #118
defrost wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NATO has advanced into which part of Russia?

Not Russia, Eastern Europe - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlargement_of_NATO

So, NATO hasn't advanced into Russia then?

Just Russia advancing into the Ukraine (after promising not to if the USSR nukes were given to Russia)?

Gotcha.

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

#168

Post by lelanthran »

simondotau wrote: post #86
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.

> 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.

I can do that too. Most programmers can.

That's because it requires less skill! Critiquing something is always easier than doing it.

I can literally keep an LLM fixing things forever by just saying things like "This is not scalable", or "this is not maintainable", or "this is not flexible" or "this is not robust", ... etc ad nausem.

That doesn't take skill at the level to actually write the software. For the market which is hoping to switch to mostly LLM coding, the prize they are eyeing is skill devaluation and not just, as many think, productivity gains.

They have no reason to double output, but they'd sure love to first halve the people employed, and then halve the salaries of those people (supply/demand + a glut of programmers in the market), and then halve salaries again because almost no skill necessary...

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

#169

Post by chanux »

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…

> When bean-counters took over the ecosystem [...] in their mind, every part of the system needs to be firing at 100% all the time.

This is only fair, because they themselves are firing at 100% all the time IYKWIM ;)

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