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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

#581

Post by b00ty4breakfast »

At least here in America, we've been offshoring coding since at least the late 90s. Often, that code isn't so great (this is not an indictment of foreign workers in general but these off-shore operations are not always on the up-and-up).

And just like offshoring dev work, we may see the rebound effect when there's all kinds of poorly written LLM outputs in production and companies are running around trying to re-hire high quality devs to fix all these fires that they themselves started.

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

#582

Post by linhns »

VikRubenfeld wrote: post #567

These LLMs are great for now, but they have to go by their training materials. And if people stop creating new ways to code, new languages, new coding patterns, etc, then the code LLMs produce will be stuck in 2026 forever.

Someone will use LLMs to create new languages, from which new patterns will arise.

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

#584

Post by mitjam »

bluGill wrote: post #353
don_esteban wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correction: The US was pushing NATO to invest more in US gear.

That was the hope but nothing stopped the EU from making their own stuff.

This is not true, since the 1990 the us was strongly opposed on the eu building or relying more on own defense industry and more closely aligned defence policy, even threatening end of NATO. Lookup the "three Ds" articulated later by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: No Duplication of NATO assets, No Decoupling of European security from the US, and No Discrimination against NATO members who were not in the EU.

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

#585

Post by dublinstats »

roenxi wrote: post #190
rotis wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He writes 2,253 candidates and 2,069 were disqualified. 184 were qualified, so 1 in 12 was considered competent.

Then he quotes 0.18% to show how rare a quality is, which is a wrong interpretation of the numbers. If he'd said 8% that would be realistic.

The number of actual openings is not given.

Also the number who turned their offers down (and perhaps the number they disqualified due to being overqualified and too expensive).

Ultimately kind of a meaningless metric.

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

#586

Post by SlinkyOnStairs »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #405
SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> And in the background of this something ominous: Companies can't just pivot back to higher quality after they've destroyed all their inhouse knowledge. (...) They can't move back upmarket after that's done. The knowledge isn't the problem. It can be quickly regained, and progress of science and technology often offer new paths to even better quality, which limits the need for recovering details of old process. The…

> It can be quickly regained

I'm not sure what you mean with this?

Sure, hypothetically e.g. any western car manufacturer could poach a bunch of BYD employees. But it's not really practical for most businesses.

> The actual problem is, there is no market to go up to anymore.

This is the "Market for Lemons" problem, yes.

It's less of a problem than you might think. Convincing the entire wider world that you're legitimate is a problem. One made infinitely worse by store marketplaces like Amazon preferring to push "aqekj;bgrsabhghwjbgawrjwsraG" brand garbage.

So you just don't. The trick is to start small. The smallest you can sustain. (This doesn't work for cars, or anything that's sufficiently complex. You won't be taking on Salesforce.)

But so long as you can find a market niche where there's demand for quality, you can carve out a living, and from there, scale up.

The problem with that is twofold: Venture Capital has supplanted other forms of investment and "small business generating single digit millions in revenue" is utterly unappealing to VCs, even though the investment required is downsized accordingly.

And problem #2: The cost of starting a business is too high right now. Real estate and cost of living just make it unaffordable to even try. + Healthcare if you're in the US.

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

#587

Post by Aaargh20318 »

esseph wrote: post #286
Aaargh20318 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pursuit…

Jobless people normally can't feed themselves in a modern world. And uh, healthcare. Among other things.

Exactly, so that problem needs to be solved. Labour and income should not be linked.

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

#588

Post by black3r »

cpursley wrote: post #283
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…

Another perspective: AI reduces brain effort in some domains which actually frees up brain juice that can be applied elsewhere.

For me AI mostly reduces time effort. AI types code faster than I do, looks up stuff on the internet faster than I do, debugs faster than I do, but doing those never required much "brain effort" from me.

What does require "brain effort" from me is making educated decisions. Mostly during planning to figure out which pros/cons of each possible approach are actually relevant for our situation - AI does this poorly, makes lots of wrong assumptions if you don't steer it correctly, and noticing these + correcting AI on them requires "brain effort" too. Then the part of code review where you think about what can go wrong. AI still sucks at figuring out edge cases. It doesn't "know" the entire codebase like I do, its context only has "the parts of codebase deemed relevant".

Before AI I could jump from 30 minutes of hard thinking into an hour of coding during which my brain essentially rested, before returning to hard thinking again. Nowadays those hour-long coding sessions turn into 5-10 minutes of watching AI do something.

So for me using AI doesn't "free up brain juice", it instead makes me use my "brain effort" more, and in a workplace environment gives me less time to rest and makes me more tired, cause nowadays bosses expect us to work faster + colleagues working faster means more review requests.

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

#589

Post by therealdrag0 »

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…

Sure, we live in a society. Seniority is about your ability to make an impact, which generally requires social and organizational skills. It can be bemoaned as much as you want but that’s how the world works.

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

#590

Post by dragontamer »

wry_durian wrote: post #270
dragontamer wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wut? The point of the beer game is that buffering in the supply chain makes the bullwhip effect worse.

If "winning" the beer game means not overreacting to short-term signals, then you can view that as a form of slack. You're sometimes paying a bit extra to hold onto something that you have no immediate short-term use for.

You are supposed to play the beer game twice. Once where you use the obvious slack and buffering.

And a 2nd time where you minimize buffering and use just in time inventory management.

People who have played the game knows which one outperforms. By significant margins.

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