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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

#271

Post by fauigerzigerk »

The defense analogy makes absolutely no sense. All the examples are of production shutdowns or reductions. Knowledge was lost because people retired and not replaced at all. None of it was lost to automation.

Automation is the exact opposite of tying knowledge to people. It's extracting knowledge from people and transferring it to a machine that can continue to produce the goods.

Yes, AI can lead to problems and some of these problems will be related to gaps in knowledge that was thought to be obsolete when it really wasn't. But that's a totally different problem on a totally different scale from what happened with defense production after the end of the cold war.

Nobody is shutting down or reducing software production. On the contrary, we're going to be making a lot more of it.

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

#272

Post by mewpmewp2 »

Jtarii wrote: post #259
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear this a lot, but also I'm curious. How can you really forget coding? It doesn't seem to me a thing that I could suddenly forget? Without AI I will feel frustrated that I'm now much slower, but ultimately it's just describing logic. So I'm a bit skeptical of the claim. My brain effort is also on other things now, such as how to orchestrate guardrails, how to build pipelines to enable multiple agents work on the…

If your internet died you would likely be worse at programming that you were in 2020. I think is what people are getting at.

If my internet died in 2020 I would also be useless because probably I couldn't install/download all the libs/frameworks, etc.

But if I didn't need those things, and there was a simple pseudolang syntax which acted exactly the same in all versions, didn't have any breaking changes, I would argue I'd be much better at it now.

Internet, search etc is needed to understand how to setup libs/frameworks/APIs, but logic at itself isn't something that I could possibly forget. AI will help to get those setups quicker without me having to search, but arguably it's all useless information, that will get out of date, that I really don't even need to know. I don't need to know top of my head what the perfect modern tsconfig setup should look like or what is the best monorepo framework and how to set it up, so it would scalably support all different coding languages for different purposes.

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

#273

Post by esseph »

SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #243
vishnugupta wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

They also took out all the quality , though in pure business terms one can argue that's a kind of "slack" by itself. The beancounters have cut all the corners on physical products that they could find. Now even design and manufacturing is outsourced to the lowest bidder, a bunch of monkeys paid peanuts to do a job they're woefully unqualified for. And the end result is just a market for lemons. Nobody trusts products…

> E.g. Desktop Linux has always been kind of a joke

And yet I run it every day, and it's by FAR the most enjoyable platform and tooling to use (for me).

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

#274

Post by barnabee »

catcowcostume wrote: post #253
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.

Anything AI generated is troll. There's no logic. It's just pattern repetitions. I don't get how supposedly smart engineers fall for it

Because a lot of engineering is pattern repetition, which is not very fun for engineers either, and LLMs can do it much faster?

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

#275

Post by barankilic »

TonyAlicea10 wrote: post #210

“Money was never the constraint. Knowledge was.” The irony is how difficult it is to read this obviously AI-generated article due to its unnatural prose and choppy flow full of LLM-isms. The ability to write is also a skill that atrophies. Even when AI is understandably used due to language fluency, I’d prefer to read an AI translation over a generated article. If you don’t care enough to write it, why should I care…

I am really amazed at how we are really okay with LLMs writing code end to end (without human in the loop) / dark factory concept but when it comes articles, HN is suddenly against LLMs writing words. I do not see the difference between writing code and writing prose. Both have keywords, grammars, syntax, meaningful combinations (function or chaining in code / collocations in words). If we think that AI-generated words are not meaningful or easy to follow that same must apply to AI-generated code, which may be harder to read or understand since it is not written by human. Let's stop being hypocrites.

Note: My comment is not specific to this comment. I just wanted to express myself at somewhere and this is where I think it may be suitable.

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

#276

Post by gonzalohm »

Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #186
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…

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,…

I think you are right, but it also makes sense. Human communication is inherently inefficient. Points of view, miscommunication, interpretation... It's the obvious point to automate. Not defending it, just my thoughts

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

#277

Post by mewpmewp2 »

Jtarii wrote: post #261
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean if e.g. AI stopped existing all of sudden, it doesn't mean you would have forgot how to code and couldn't all of sudden anymore, right? You could forget maybe how a certain lib or framework worked or things like that, or more so how you wouldn't have been up to date with all the new ones, but ultimately code can be represented as just functions with input and output, and that's all there is to it. As in how co…

A writer will never forget what adjectives, verbs, and nouns are. But if they use LLMs to write for them for years they will be worse at writing on their own.

Well, what I'm trying to say here is that coding is conveying logic, the way you'd evaluate it is how fit it is for its purpose, and if it's long term code, how well it will scale into future.

Now writing is something totally different. In some cases writing ability is not about writing, it's about your thoughts and understanding of life and human nature.

You could simply become a better writer without not writing anything by just observing.

If you are using an LLM to write, what is the purpose of that? Are you writing news articles or are you writing a story reflecting your observations of human nature with novel insights? In the latter case you couldn't utilize AI in the first place as you'd have to convey what you are trying to say within your own words, as AI would just "average" your prompt or meaning, which takes away from the initial point.

With code it's desired that it's to be expected, with good writing it's supposed to be something that is unexpectedly insightful. It's completely different.

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

#278

Post by throwaw12 »

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…

This shows Western government system is broken.

In ideal world (where we don't live):

* Corporation - optimizes for mid-to-short term profits (remove slack, run everything thin)

* Government - optimizes for long term profits (introduce regulations to keep the slack time, keep and attract the talent so state gets better)

* Individual - optimizes for their life time (career, family and tries to leverage market conditions to learn skills and get more opportunities from existing pool)

In the west, government is optimizing for "loads and loads of moooney", because of lobby groups and MBAs controlling the corporations which are pushing these ideas through lobbies

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

#280

Post by skydhash »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #258
vjsrinivas wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are not practicing an activity consistently, you'll forget some of the finer grained aspects. When I'm coding, I subconsciously create a continuous logic map. Having someone or something just generate (and generate so quickly) destroys that and makes it easier for bugs to slip through.

I mean if e.g. AI stopped existing all of sudden, it doesn't mean you would have forgot how to code and couldn't all of sudden anymore, right? You could forget maybe how a certain lib or framework worked or things like that, or more so how you wouldn't have been up to date with all the new ones, but ultimately code can be represented as just functions with input and output, and that's all there is to it. As in how co…

Coding is a thinking avtivity. What you’ll be missing is the nimbleness in doing that activity, not the knowledge.

So you may remember all your high school math, but not doing it every day, means you are slower than some of the students. So your knowledge of programming will be there, bit you will be slower because you no longer have the reflex that comes with doing things over and over.

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