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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

#111

Post by trick-or-treat »

latexr wrote: post #39
ktallett wrote: post #21

We have both forgotten how to make things and also decided we can make more profit letting someone else make everything for every market. We have moved to a generation fixated on maximizing profit. However there is logic there as the cost to access the ability to make things is prohibitively expensive. As someone who makes open hardware with a nod to the environment and reusability, you can not justify or even find m…

> I think we will loose a lot of people who never were passionate about programming Anecdotally, what I’m seeing right now is the opposite. People who don’t care about programming are joining, while those who do care are getting tired of the bullshit and leaving. The good programmers are the ones leaving, the hacks are extremely happy to use LLMs. When shit hits the fan, there won’t be many people left to clean it.

So you see people who don't care about programming, joining and getting comfortable with vscode and claude code and devops?

Because it seems to me like there's a lot of coding-adjacent things they still need to be able to do even if they never look at a line of code.

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

#112

Post by Terr_ »

netcan wrote: post #88
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 many domains, productivity is already sufficient. What’s being sold is workforce reduction. This is a blindspot to many. People working on entrepreneurial projects need to build a lot. They start with nothing. They need (for example) features. There's a lot to do. Most firms are not that. Visa, Salesforce, LinkedIn or whatnot. They have a product. They have features. They have been at it for a while. They also…

> If there were known "make more software, make more money" opportunities available, they would have already done them.

Sometimes they're available, but not palatable, when the opportunity could threaten their existing investments or patterns. That might mean "self-cannibalism", or changing the ecology so that the main product niche is threatened.

Then those opportunities are ignored, or actively worked-against via lobbying, embrace-extend-extinguish, etc.

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

#113

Post by 0xpgm »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #108

The article makes no sense, and stars with a very wrong perspective on things. This kind of forgetting is normal . It's how things work when time and resources are finite. The only problem here is the belief that you can keep capacity to do something without actively exercising it, and thus the expectation that you can "just" resume doing things after a long break, without paying up a cold-start cost. But you can't,…

> This kind of forgetting is normal

Just as shift in power and the rise and fall of nations is normal.

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

#114

Post by cjfd »

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 sounds all true to me, but I think there is more. It is not just decisions by management, it is also the wider economic context. Low interest rates and, for the US, having the world reserve currency as your own currency both seem to make many of these changes attractive or even inevitable. Low interest rates lead to 'innovation' which I put in scare quotes because besides real innovation it can also mean something that passes as innovation but in the end just turns out to be a bubble of stuff that was not valuable enough. The 'innovation' then crowds out investments in more boring sectors like manufacturing. This is also not good for the population in general because fewer jobs are left for people who are not suited for working in highly 'innovative' sectors.

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

#115

Post by LeCompteSftware »

anonzzzies wrote: post #65
LeCompteSftware wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of the article is that sometimes the "old ways" really means "not particularly profitable or necessary in the short term" but the bill comes due in a crisis. The reason US/EU manufacturing was "the old ways" is that people could make easier money with financial engineering, an insight that extended all the way to Raytheon. COBOL is a bad example, but higher-level languages vs. assembly is not. If you write…

But these are hard IT things a human programmer really struggles with as well. What % of software written is that? Very very low. Most software is dull and requires business vagueness to be translated into deterministic logic and interfaces; LLMs are pretty great at that as it is. If humans use their old ways to fix complex problems and llms do the rest, we still only need a handful of those humans. For now.

"For now" is sort of the entire point of the article :)

Even in the Before Times, it was much cognitively cheaper to write code than it is to read someone else's code closely, or manage lots of independent code across a team, or to make a serious change to existing code. It's so much easier to just let everyone slap some slop on the pile and check off their user stories. I think it will take years to figure out exactly what the impact of LLMS on software is. But my hunch is that it'll do a lot of damage for incremental benefit.

With the sole exception of "LLMs are good at identifying C footguns," I have yet to see AI solve any real problems I've personally identified with the long-term development and maintenance of software. I only see them making things far worse in exchange for convenience. And I am not even slightly reassured by how often I've seen a GitHub project advertise thousands of test cases, then I read a sample of those test cases and 98% of them are either redundant or useless. Or the studies which suggest software engineers consistently overestimate the productivity benefits of AI, and psychologically are increasingly unable to handle manual programming. Or the chardet maintainer seemingly vibe-benchmarking his vibe-coded 7.0 rewrite when it was in reality a lot slower than the 6.0, and he's still digging through regression bugs. It feels like dozens of alarms are going off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

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

#116

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

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.

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

#117

Post by collinfunk »

roenxi wrote: post #51
collinfunk wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You see zero similarities between Hitler invading Poland and Putin invading Ukraine?

There are some pretty substantial differences. Russia is on the strategic back foot here trying to figure out a way to stop NATO's advance. They've only turned to violence after long attempts at resolving the tension diplomatically and the US has been implacable. Putin's actually been pretty hesitant in his escalations so far; he's 70 and has a long history of trying to avoid war. Hitler was more about wanting more l…

> There are some pretty substantial differences. Russia is on the strategic back foot here trying to figure out a way to stop NATO's advance.

His rationale for invading Ukraine was to "demilitarise and denazify" it. The NATO point seems largely be invented by people who dislike NATO in the west.

> They've only turned to violence after long attempts at resolving the tension diplomatically and the US has been implacable.

I hope the "tension" you are referring to was not the little green men taking over Crimea and the Donbas in 2014.

> Putin's actually been pretty hesitant in his escalations so far; he's 70 and has a long history of trying to avoid war.

This is a totally unseriousness statement. Can you remind me what Putin was doing in Syria again?

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

#118

Post by roenxi »

defrost wrote: post #105
roenxi wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some pretty substantial differences. Russia is on the strategic back foot here trying to figure out a way to stop NATO's advance. They've only turned to violence after long attempts at resolving the tension diplomatically and the US has been implacable. Putin's actually been pretty hesitant in his escalations so far; he's 70 and has a long history of trying to avoid war. Hitler was more about wanting more l…

NATO has advanced into which part of Russia?

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

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

#120

Post by rotis »

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.

I don't have a problem with AI assistance either, but this undermines the point the article is making. For me it is like a priest preaching gay sex is wrong and then being caught in bed with a male prostitute (snorting cocaine optional). Leaves bad taste in the mouth.
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