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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

#221

Post by teaearlgraycold »

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…

> 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.

This is depressing and seems right. And yet this is something I desperately want to be ignorant of. I don’t want to peel apart my brain for anyone. Working within these kinds of problems is pure pain.

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

#222

Post by 2ndorderthought »

MattJ100 wrote: post #199
Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like it’s something more fundamental and broad than that. We slowly remove excuses to talk to other people. The thought crossed my mind the other day — if I’m asking the AI a question, that’s replacing a human interaction I would have had with a coworker. It’s not just in coding, it’s everything. With ChatGPT always available in your pocket, what social interactions is it replacing? The thing that gets me is,…

We see this in our open-source community. We've had a community channel for over two decades, where community members help newcomers and each other solve problems and answer questions. Increasingly we have people join who tell us they've been struggling with a problem "for days". Per routine, we ask for their configuration, and it turns out they've been asking ChatGPT, Claude or some other LLM for assistance and thei…

Personally this type of behavior played a large part in why I left 2 oss communities.

A lot of the passerbys nowadays feel like trolls. They come in copy pasting chatgpt responses spamming they need help instead of chit chatting asking questions. We fix their problems, they don't trust us or understand at all. Or worse we tell them their situation is unreasonably bad and they should start over, they scream at us about how some unimaginably bad code passes tests and compiles just fine and how we are dumb.

They tell us we don't need to exist anymore in one way or another. They try to show off terrible code we try to offer real suggestions to improve it, they don't care. Then they leave the community once their vibe/agentic coding leaves that part of their code base. Complete waste of time, they learned nothing, contribute nothing, no fun was had, no ah-hahs, just grimey interactions.

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

#223

Post by eolgun »

muragekibicho wrote: post #191
eolgun wrote: post #183

The Fogbank example is the most chilling part. It's not just that they lost the people — they lost the ability to know what they didn't know. Nobody could even write down what was missing because the knowledge was never formalized in the first place. The junior hiring collapse compounds this. Senior engineers develop judgment partly by watching juniors make mistakes and correcting them. Remove that loop and you don't…

The junior hiring collapse is all so bizarre. I graduated recently and my career prospects are jarringly limited. I thought I'd go back for a Masters/PhD but then Trump mercurially defunded lots of STEM grad programs. Ngl, I found myself stuck. Zero job openings, zero PhD program openings. It's all so frustrating.

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

#224

Post by bluGill »

LtWorf wrote: post #201
brabel wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prepared…

USA had no part in that push?

Perhaps but the US was pushing NATO to invest more in war for years suggesting they didn't believe war was in the past

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

#225

Post by zwischenzug »

It's a great story, and a nicely written piece.

But civilisations have always forgotten things and then had to re-engineer them. We only recently recreated Roman-equivalent concrete; knowledge required to create the Saturn V rockets had to be re-engineered; we can't recreate medieval stained glass exactly, or Viking Ulfberht Swords; we would struggle to create Betamax tape today.

Many of the examples I found (as expected) relate to military or commercially sensitive technology that did not get written down (for obvious reasons).

It also reminded me when I read Thomas Thwaites' "The Toaster Project: Or a Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch", where to make a smelter from scratch he relied on a 450 year old book ("De re metallica" by Georgius Agricola), as well as a friendly Metallurgist.

We already lost the widespread ability to write assembler in an artisinal way. Now we have AI we will also be lazy about how we write individual bits of artisinal code. So what? Yes it will cost more (in time and money) when we need to re-engineer, but how much would it cost to keep alive all the knowledge and skills we might possibly need in the future?

We had better make sure we write down and preserve the recorded data though :)

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

#227

Post by LtWorf »

ReptileMan wrote: post #214
liendolucas wrote: post #152

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 tri…

>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. I find myself thinking more and my thinking is of higher quality. Now I have 30 years of fucked up projects experience, so I know all the rakes I could ste…

You probably overestimate yourself.

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

#228

Post by ffsm8 »

bradleyjg wrote: post #174
lelanthran wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 flexib…

That's because it requires less skill! Critiquing something is always easier than doing it. No, it was always the other way around. Mediocre programmers always wanted to rewrite everything because reading and understanding an existing codebase was always harder than writing some greenfield thing with a “modern language” or “modern libraries” or “modern idioms.” So they’d go and do that and end up with 100x the bugs.

You can't generalize that statement.

There is a very valid reason why the Creator of erlang back in the day said something along the line of "you need to iteratively remake your software, improving it each time"

As your knowledge about a topic grows, your initial mistaken implementation may become more and more obvious, and it may even mean a full rewrite.

But yes, a person which instantly says "rewrite" before they understood the software is likely very inexperienced and has only worked with greenfield projects with few contributers (likely only themselves) before.

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

#229

Post by mondomondo »

neonstatic wrote: post #99
whycombinetor wrote: post #8

>I read the Fogbank story and recognized it immediately. Not the nuclear material. The pattern. Build capability over decades. Find a cheaper substitute. Let the human pipeline atrophy. Enjoy the savings. Then watch it all collapse when a crisis demands what you optimized away. >In defense, the substitute was the peace dividend. In software, it’s AI. Before it was AI, the cheaper alternative was remote contract dev t…

It had to be H1B Indians and outsourcing to India. As a European, I have seen some "Eastern European devs" around, sure. But they were not present at every company I worked with. Indians were. Quality-wise, it was always the same story, but I'm not going to elaborate. Everyone who is ready to accept it, knows what I would be saying anyway.

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